


Limit of the Flesh

by damalur



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Pining, Post-War, Slow Burn, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-01
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-29 07:04:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 25,264
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5119466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shepard and Vakarian, post-war but pre-relationship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [galfridian](https://archiveofourown.org/users/galfridian/gifts).



She had been through the end of the world and was currently at the end of her rope. The invitation was addressed to _Admiral Jane Shepard, SAN, Retired (and guest)._ Whoever wrote the address had clearly gone to a lot of effort, since half of Shepard's mail was still sent to 'Commander' Shepard, and the rest was made out to 'Agent' or 'Specialist' Shepard, which as a Council Spectre was technically her only active rank. The Systems Alliance had rewarded her for her service with a promotion, a salarian-made prosthetic leg, and an order to retire that was only thinly veiled as a suggestion.

Meanwhile: the letter.

She flipped it over. The paper of the envelope was heavy, fine under her fingertips, and smelled like nothing discernible. Shepard couldn't remember the last time someone had sent her a physical letter that didn't come attached to a crate of munitions.

From behind her came the pop-hiss of an airlock opening as Garrus made his way onto the bridge of the light corvette they shared. He dropped into the pilot's seat beside her—and hadn't that been a pain, convincing the manufacturer to install one crash seat for a turian and one for a human?—and tilted his head. "Another invitation?"

Shepard grunted.

"Whoever it is must be damn rich," Garrus said. "Not many people want to pay the postal fees for letters." 

Shepard grunted again.

"Going to open it?"

"Getting there," she said, and used her thumb to tear the flap open. What came out of the envelope was a single piece of heavy cardstock inviting her to a gala thrown by the David Anderson Foundation. On the back was a handwritten note: _Shepard - hope to see you there._ It was signed by Hackett.

She held it out to Garrus; he took it and scanned it, and then he said, "Well, that's one way to get you to finally make an appearance."

"No," she said.

"Shepard," Garrus said.

"You want to let a whole gang of slavers escape so I can parade around like a circus act?" said Shepard, who thought she had a pretty sound argument. "No, Garrus."

"Hackett's going. He never goes out in public anymore—"

Garrus was as bad as she was at letting go of a topic, so Shepard made the smart choice and walked away. The problem with living and working in the same starship was that Garrus could and did follow. There was no escape, short of locking herself in the head or throwing herself out of an airlock, and Shepard, who had already suffered one death in the vacuum of space, wasn't eager to repeat the experience.

"Hackett never goes out in public anymore," Garrus said again. "You'll regret not seeing him."

"If I wanted to see him, I'd call him," said Shepard. She'd run out of places to go, so she turned around and started slamming her way through the galley cabinets. MREs. MREs. MREs. One of them really needed to learn how to cook. "And I don't have an X.O. to pick out a dress for me anymore. No."

"If that's your excuse, I'll buy you a dress," said Garrus.

Shepard didn't do anything as drastic as freeze; her halt was slower than that, more like a child running out of momentum than an adult turning to stone; but she stopped with her back to Garrus nonetheless, and she hated herself for it.

They'd fought a long war together, and now they were fighting a longer recovery. After she'd been medically cleared to return to active duty, it had seemed natural to partner with Garrus, himself a newly-minted Spectre despite his refusal to stray from Shepard's side through her long crawl back to health. Their pairing had been a wild success despite their unorthodox methods, and the Council of New Eden Prime was willing to let them go about their business with minimal interference, unlike either the Systems Alliance or the Hierarchy.

In a fit of camaraderie on the eve of the Battle of London, Garrus had told her that there was no Shepard without Vakarian. That was true even in what felt like her afterlife, and in fact Shepard and Vakarian were lauded galaxy-wide as the height of interspecies cooperation… of interspecies _friendship_. Unfortunately, when she no longer had an invasion of eldritch abominations to occupy her attention, Shepard had finally realized that her feelings for Garrus ran somewhat deeper than camaraderie.

She wouldn't ever tell him, of course. There was no point in ruining what was the best and most rewarding relationship of her life for a roll in the hay. He was her hunting partner, and that was more than enough; that was everything.

But then he had to say things like that…

"No," said Shepard. "Hell no."

Garrus sighed, a much more resonant sound than any sigh uttered by a human, and a long arm reached over her head and shut the cabinet she was staring into.

 _"Jane,"_ he said.

"Is there some part of 'hell no' that you aren't understanding?" said Shepard.

There was a pause, and for every second of that pause she was aware of his warmth at her back. It made her feel like getting shitfaced.

"What if I offer to go with you?" 

"Trust me, Garrus," Shepard said. "That's not gonna help at all."


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy N7 Day! This appears to be turning into a drabble series. Oops.

At least the gala was months away; she didn't have to make any decisions now, and in the wake of the war, that was a blessing. Shepard's decisions were small-scale now. The choices she made for her crew of two were made jointly, and the only other lives she held in her hands were those of the men and women she decided were criminal. It was still a heavy burden, but far less heavy than the burden she had carried when she was the galaxy's vanguard against the Reapers. Her life now was as simple as she could make it without sacrificing her sense of purpose.

She was in the hold dry-firing her pistol when Garrus found her. He didn't say anything; he just sat down on a crate, leaned towards her with his forearms braced on his knees, and watched.

Shepard did this every day despite the tedium of it, and she did it until the tendons of her hands and wrists and arms ached. _Click click click,_ two hundred times, and then she switched hands. _Click click click clickclickclickclick—_

She fired with both eyes open, as she'd been taught a lifetime from now and a hundred thousand light-years from here; the ghosts she saw on the other side of her sights were hers alone, and even Garrus would never hear their names.

Despite her Cerberus 'enhancements', Shepard's hands started to quiver after a couple thousand rounds. _Click click click_ switch _click click click_ and the joints in her arms were starting to burn, _click click click_ switch _click click_ quiver _click_ until a long, three-fingered hand wrapped over the top of her sidearm and forced her into stillness.

"Jane," Garrus said, "that's enough."

The nearness of him was impossible. He was a big guy, Garrus, even for a turian man, and usually Shepard liked that—she liked that the enormity of his presence in her own life was echoed in his physical mass, and she liked having someone solid and strong at her back. Right now, though, she found his existence infuriating.

She didn't have any particular preferences in her attractions. Species mattered almost as little as gender to Shepard; she stuck mostly with humans out of availability, but any port in a storm—and her attachments were few and far between, anyway, and rarely lasted more than a few days. Sex and friendship together she could at least begin to grasp, but what she felt for Garrus couldn't be contained by that label, and sex tangled up with whatever the elusive thing she felt for him was…

She jerked her pistol down and out of his grasp, snatched the ammo block from the bench beside her, and slammed it home. 

"You're going to need muscle relaxants if you keep it up," he said in a low voice.

"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, Garrus. Thanks."

The worst part of it all was that she _wanted_ him. Jane Shepard did not _want_. She resolved herself, and then by sheer dint of will transformed those resolutions into reality, but never had she wanted something so intensely and personally as this. 

It was starting to make her resent him.


	3. Chapter 3

They were laid up on Illium to restock and refuel before heading out to the deeper Terminus Systems on the trail of a war criminal that the Council wanted brought to trial. He wasn't Cerberus, the war criminal—this one had sold an entire colony out to the Reapers of his own free will, giving up the access codes to nuclear warheads that otherwise could have delayed the Reapers by weeks, and then he'd had the balls to abscond with several million government credits. 

What Shepard hated about the Terminus was that it _thrived_. Council space was still crippled, perhaps fatally so; the asari might take a generation or more to recover from the damage done to their homeworlds, and humans were in a worse position still. She was short-tempered and had been for days. Garrus was patient with her, of course. His time as a cop had taught him that, she suspected, but it was the war that had tempered that patience into something immeasurable, and for a man who was a firebrand at heart, he held his temper well. He was so damn kind to her that it made Shepard sick.

What she hated more than the Terminus was being in debt, and she owed Garrus a debt so profound that if she lived another century, she still couldn't begin to repay it. There was more there than mere indebtedness, too; she wished in a very private corner of her soul that she could be kind to him back—not out of obligation, but because he deserved it, and because she wanted him to have kindness in his life. The seed of her resentment had come from that hidden, selfless flower of generosity.

And her nightmares were getting worse. There were good spells and bad spells; this was one of the bad.

"Did you talk to a mechanic about the inertial dampeners?" Garrus asked her. It was morning where they were docked, and Shepard was gulping down reconstituted eggs even though there were a dozen restaurants and food stands in walking distance of their berth.

"No," Shepard said.

"...All right," he said, even though this was the only thing he'd asked of her in days, even though he'd handled the purchase and delivery of all the dozens of things they needed to restock their ship, even though Shepard had spent most of those days either staring at a console or hiding in what had to be Illium's seediest gym. The residents of Illium rarely did 'seedy', since it was bad for business; she'd had to hunt hard to find a gym that disreputable, but it had a boxing ring and a line of people willing to fight, provided she signed the appropriate waivers beforehand.

"I'll take care of it on my way back today," Garrus was saying. "There's a cleaning crew coming to service our filtration system at 1400—think you'll be here?"

"No," Shepard said, without offering further explanation.

"I'll stick around until then," he said easily, although Shepard knew he had a tightbeam call scheduled with his sister at one of the local communications hubs around the same time; normally he'd have used the computer onboard the _Valkyrie_ , but it was down for maintenance and wouldn't be back up until the specialist returned tomorrow.

"Fine," Shepard said. She dumped her dishes in the sink and turned on the water. When they seemed sufficiently rinsed, she stuck them in the dishwasher drawer, dried her hands on a rag, and snatched up her gym bag from where it sat beside the hatch. She was already dressed for a workout, but she took the time to drop her bag on the table and dig through it for a sweatshirt before leaving; as a young, dumb jarhead she'd gotten a tattoo that read 'ONE SHOT, ONE KILL' in a conspicuous place, and the last time she'd walked through Illium's market with bare arms, a woman had stopped her to tell her how very offensive that slogan was. 

Shepard no longer disagreed, but neither could she stifle the immediate anger that rose at a civilian trying to demean what was an enormous part of the foundation of her identity. Before he died, Vega had given her shit about it. "What about a good ol' double-tap?" he'd asked, and Shepard, stone-faced but not without humor, had answered: "Insurance for people who can't aim."

Garrus watched her as she dragged the sweatshirt over her head and pulled the red tail of her hair out from under the collar. Sometimes, on the rare occasions she caught her own eye in the mirror, she thought that her own sniper's stare matched his, and then she would sneer at herself for imagining the similarities between Garrus and herself were more than superficial. Shepard's gaze was hard. Garrus, though, watched her with eyes that weren't cold but were rather the hot blue of a gas flame.

She hefted the strap of her duffle bag over her shoulder and ducked out of the galley. Garrus's voice followed her: "Know when you'll be back?"

Shepard paused but didn't turn around. "No," she said. "But don't wait up."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies to anyone looking for longer updates; I'm getting a kick out of have a low-pressure fic that I can plink away at in short segments, but I know that chapters that aren't even a thousand words can be unsatisfying. Thanks for sticking with me anyway!

She spent a meditative afternoon in the boxing ring, loving the high and hating it. Shepard was so numbed to horror that few things genuinely rattled her anymore, but what she did still fear was that she was not only good at hurting people but enjoyed it. At Torfan she had drawn back from herself and started a long, slow crawl back to sanity and atonement, but she had never entirely rid herself of those darker impulses. There was a difference between being a soldier and being a killer, and Shepard sometimes found herself passing over that line without being aware of it.

Garrus found her at the gym some hours later. She was sitting on a bench, bent over with her elbows braced on her knees and her head down, when she felt him settle beside her. Instead of looking up, she kept studying her hands. There was some light surgical scarring there, of course, but her knuckles were worse off—thick gnarls of scar tissue braided over them, so old that not even Miranda Lawson had been able to eradicate them from Shepard's body.

Something wet landed on her upper lip, and she realized that her nose was bleeding sluggishly.

"Shepard—" Garrus said, and then he broke off and sighed heavily. Shepard half-expected him to stand up and leave; while she could be friendly, even jocular, with her crew, she'd never been particularly open, and she was growing more taciturn by the day. While he was used to her silences, she couldn't imagine that he enjoyed them.

Instead, though, he reached over, folded her hand in both of his, and drew it towards him. Shepard jerked, startled by the action, but instinctively yielded to his grip when he didn't release her. It said a lot that she let him touch her like this, and a lot that he was willing to touch someone who was, for better or worse, a legend in her own lifetime. When he flattened her fingers out and rubbed his thumb along her palm, the sensation of his bare skin against hers was so foreign in its decadence and so shockingly different from the sharp pain of her bruised knuckles that she sucked in a short, sharp gasp of air.

When had their partnership shifted? For so long Shepard had been his commander and mentor, the person he went to for comfort or advice, the woman who had dragged him back from the brink of self-destruction although she herself had not been long out of the grave. Now, though, she gave him almost nothing and was rewarded in turn with a loyalty so broad and deep that it humbled her when she wasn't too angry that she couldn't drive him away to fathom it.

She didn't say any of that. What the fuck was the point? Garrus was beside her and would be until he wised up; the problem was that he'd always been short on wisdom and long on stubbornness. 

He had apparently finished with her palm, because he turned her hand over and begin tracing the backs of her fingers from the tips all the way down to her wrist, leaving little trails of light where he touched her. Shepard sighed, and all at once she felt the tension go out of her. Her shoulders lowered, her breath evened, and she felt her artificially-efficient pulse drop to its resting rate of forty beats per minute. 

Only when her heart had slowed did Garrus return her hand to her.


	5. Chapter 5

Someone caught the whole fucking thing on camera, of course. EDI forwarded the article; she kept tabs on all of her crew, former and current, although only Williams, Joker, and Sam Traynor still served aboard the _Normandy_. The headline made Shepard wince, but the picture was the really damning part. The photographer had caught them in the moment Garrus had first reached out for Shepard's hand; she was staring at him wide-eyed and enthralled, lips parted, the flush on her cheeks made all the more obvious by the pallor of her skin, which had always been stark but was made even more so because she spent all her time on starships or in heavy armor.

It didn't matter that the slant of her brow in the picture tended towards a scowl; Shepard could see the astonishment, the _reverence_ , in her own face, and it repulsed her enough that she didn't read the story that accompanied the photograph. It was probably the same tabloid garbage that had been plaguing her since becoming the first human Spectre—since Mindoir, if she was being honest, because the moment she'd stepped off the SSV _Einstein_ as a traumatized sixteen-year-old, the press had been waiting.

They were en route to the Far Rim when their local network downloaded EDI's message from a nearby comm buoy, and Shepard was, regrettably, not alone. The _Valkyrie_ had a rather spacious lounge between their separate quarters; they'd converted most of the area into a gym using portable partitions, but there was still a snug alcove with a sizeable monitor, a couch, and a game table wedged in the corner. Garrus was slouched on the couch with his feet kicked out in front of him while he watched one of his holonovels; Shepard was on the opposite side of the couch, browsing through the library on her tablet and wondering irritably why all she read was stellar fantasy or military history. There wasn't a book under four hundred pages in the entire collection. That was when she saw the notification from EDI.

Garrus caught her sudden tension, because he paused his drama before she flung the tablet off her lap. "Shepard?"

"It's nothing," she snapped.

"Ah," Garrus said, and then he picked up the tablet and looked at it. Shepard wanted to yank it out of his hands, but it was only a matter of time until he saw it. Media interest in her had died some since the war, but that was largely because Shepard traveled with Spectre security access and spent most of her time in portions of the galaxy that could be… difficult for the press to reach.

A moment later he echoed her sound of distress, and when she looked over, he was pinching the bridge of his flat nose between his fingers. "Damn," he said, softly enough that it was more to himself than to her. "I didn't even see them there."

"Could have been a nano-drone," Shepard said. "Or a long-distance camera or… shit, who the hell knows."

"They shouldn't be making insinuations like this." Garrus drummed his thumb against the surface of the tablet, and Shepard realized he was angry. _"'Lauded galaxy-wide as the paragons of interspecies cooperation, insiders have long speculated that Shepard and Vakarian's relationship goes deeper than'_ —dammit." He broke off in a snarl.

This was the long and short of it: once Shepard had been the most capable Marine of her generation, a swift and deadly operative that went where her superiors pointed her. While her personal life might have been in shambles, she had a promising career ahead of her, was on good terms with the Alliance brass, could outshoot most computers, and felt both pride in her accomplishments and cautious optimism for her future. She had always, of course, been a hard woman, prone to fighting, with a mouth too smart for its own good and a history so soaked in blood that it had to be either a tragedy or a farce, but…

But…

More accurate: once, she had managed to hold the blackness away, but now it had overflowed its floodwalls. This wasn't the passing shower of self-loathing or the trickle of depression that occasionally threatened her operational effectiveness after a mission like Horizon; this was a deluge, an onslaught, a tidal wave that swept her out to sea. Sometimes she wondered where all the cocky assurance of that young Marine had gone, and then she was forced to consider the idea that her arrogance had only ever been an act all along. 

She went days without sleeping and started to snarl if she went too long without a fistfight; her only skills had military applications, she was still struggling to adjust to life outside of the Alliance, her body was a clusterfuck of cybernetics and scar tissue, and the word 'love' hadn't passed her lips in nineteen years. Meanwhile, there was Garrus, who at the beginning of their friendship on the SR-1 had deprecatingly expressed a desire for children. Even if she had been the right species to give him a kid, there was nothing in her that wanted to take on that burden of responsibility. Before 2170, she had shared that vague dream of family; after 2170, family was an impossibility.

There was still hope for Garrus, though. In spite or maybe because of his facial scarring, he was appealing; people noticed when he walked into a room, and not only turian people. Maybe it was his wry humor and air of competence, or his ease with his own deadliness contrasted against his charmingly awkward interpersonal skills, or something entirely ineffable, but he'd never had a shortage of offers. If he was picking up women, though, he wasn't doing it in front of Shepard; in the entire time she'd known him, he'd never so much as gone on a date.

She could only think that was out of consideration for her delicate fucking sensibilities. Did he know? No, she thought, not that; it was more understandable during the war, when they'd all been run so ragged that libido had seemed like a thing of the past, but now he probably felt like he was too busy babysitting her to accept any of those many offers.

Like someone turned a dial to tune her into the right radio frequency, she jolted out of her own thoughts. Garrus was still snarling his way through the article, reading snippets aloud and then cussing out the news source. "Shit," he was saying, "I thought they'd finally let go of this garbage. Shepard, I'm so sorry—"

"What the hell do you have to be sorry about, Garrus?" she said. "It's not like you wrote the damn story."

"No, but the last thing you need to deal with is another case of libel. Particularly when it's so, uh." He scowled. "Obviously untrue."

Maybe her old ego hadn't left her entirely, because she felt the last of it whither when she heard him say that. It was one thing to know he deserved better, another to suspect he wasn't interested, and a third entirely to hear him outright say that he didn't think of her like… _that_.

"I'll get EDI to coordinate with the Council's legal team," Shepard said. Weariness washed over her, but she forged ahead before Garrus could respond. "She still owes me a favor for introducing her to Jordan Detweiler. They'll get the outlet to print a retraction. Don't worry about it, Vakarian—I'll make sure it doesn't hurt your prospects." She summoned up a smirk, just one soldier giving shit to another, nothing to see here, and then she stood up and cracked her neck.

"Yeah," Garrus said. "Yeah, all right, Shepard. If you say so."

"I do," she said.

"Going somewhere?"

"Just need to stretch," she said, and he was so used to her inability to sit without purpose for any length of time that he didn't question her further. She went aft, to the hold; if he started up his holonovel again, she didn't hear it.

In the hold, she took her pistol out of her locker and ran through dry-firing exercises until it felt like someone had painted fire up her forearms. She didn't take any medication before going to bed, and within hours her hands seized into stiff, twisted claws. It wasn't the pain that kept her from sleeping, though, because she was used to pain; only her fear could do that.


	6. Chapter 6

What made it more difficult was how thoroughly her life had blurred with Garrus's. On the _Normandy_ , there had been divisions—Shepard had her quarters and he had his, and while she would have been comfortable digging through his equipment for a spare heat sink in a way she wouldn't have been with Vega or Williams, their friendship had still existed within the boundaries of command and rank. Here, now, in this space where they were nominally equals, Shepard used his toothpaste and brushed against him in the galley and dug through his holonovel collection on nights when she had trouble sleeping. 

In return, she struggled to grant an equal number of concessions; communal living was familiar to Shepard, but intimacy wasn't. She let Garrus sample her food and borrow her cleaning kit and abuse her contacts, because they both gave of themselves freely; in this new world, though, when they were not _part of_ but _all of_ the crew, she realized it wasn't the acts themselves but the feeling they inspired that choked her.

She liked it, felt stifled by it, was terrified of it in equal turns.

So what did she do? She put it behind her. She compartmentalized, she shut it down, and she did her job.

After the war but before the Alliance had soured on her, the Council had extended an offer; they'd wanted her to lead a new JSOC hierarchy, something wider in scope than the Spectres. The Spectres were effective, there were statistics to back that up, but large-scale joint operations between Council races had historically been coordinated on the sovereign level—turians conducting exercises with salarians, asari deigning to loan a commando team to humans with no thought to how a drell infiltrator could assist. In the wake of the Reapers, it had become dramatically clear how badly a central oversight command was needed, an operational hub that understood the resources and capabilities of every special ops group at the Council's disposal.

On paper, Shepard was ideal for the role. She had the pedigree; her SOF training was elite to the point of absurdity, and her service record was unmatched. She had the experience in running an interspecies command, too, and the political weight to make her post useful. On paper, Shepard was ideal, but in practice, the thought of devoting the rest of her life to warfare, unconventional or otherwise, left the taste of bile on her lips and tongue.

The Alliance had been invested in having one of their own installed as the head of Joint Special Operations Command; Shepard's refusal had indirectly led to the Alliance's strongly-worded suggestion that she retire. The Council, on the other hand, had turned around and immediately offered the command to Garrus. He had demurred with the excuse that JSOC should be led by a Spectre. The Council had countered by offering him an invitation to join Special Tactics and Reconnaissance. Garrus had accepted the invitation but rejected the posting; he'd turned up the next morning in Shepard's recovery suite with a dossier of starship listings, and now here they were, partners in bounty hunting. 

There were worse jobs. At any rate, it spoke to Shepard's hypocrisy that she'd turned down a job running special operations in favor of a job that was, more or less, running special operations. Between the two of them, though, she and Garrus retained enough pull that the Council let them do what they wanted, as long as they did it quietly. Shepard still wasn't sure of Garrus's reasons for joining her on the _Valkyrie_ , but she knew that she herself was poorly suited to anything else. Her life had trained her for situations that required dramatic and violent overreaction, and her recent crucible had left her in dire need of some narrow, intent purpose.

Maybe Garrus understood. Maybe he didn't. Maybe it was only the extremity of her history that made her think of him as balanced. Her nightmares contained multitudes; she dreamed about indoctrination, about the twinned memories of death and resurrection, about seeing the jagged ends of flesh and bone when her leg had been severed below the knee; she dreamed about reducing herself to a machine, the fantasy of being a computer that calculated variables without attachment; she dreamed about Torfan, and those dreams were as bloody and terrible as anything the Reapers had left her with.

There was no scale. One dream was as bad as the next, and measuring the weight of her personal failures against the incomprehensible existential horror of the Reapers was impossible. Even so, there was still a particular dream that haunted her to the point she refused to think about it, and that was the dream of Garrus leaving. Whether he was stabbed or shot, indoctrinated or left to writhe in the black of space, whether she drove him away or his reserve of loyalty finally broke—that didn't matter. What stayed with her was the bleak knowledge of being utterly alone, of being left to rot under the cloying weight of her despair.

She adopted insomnia as a preventative. She didn't think about it. She put it behind her. And she kept moving.


	7. Chapter 7

"Maybe it's life outside of the Alliance," Shepard said. She was shaving the sides of her head in what had become a weekly ritual; the top of her hair she wore long enough to pull back in a tail, but the sides she kept short. The severity of the style emphasized the long burn weal that ran from her right cheek down to her jawline and the old scarring from Cerberus procedures that had never quite healed right. 

Garrus liked to watch. He was leaning in the open doorway of the head with his arms crossed, studying her in the mirror as she used an electric razor to neaten her undercut. "Human grooming rituals. Fascinating," he sometimes deadpanned. They'd watched _Star Trek_ months before, and he was still laughing about it.

"You miss the structure?"

"Twenty years." It was almost an answer. She finished with the right side, leaned over the sink to brush her shoulder clean, and switched to the left. She was wearing a gray tank top with no bra underneath; after a military lifetime, modesty was an afterthought, and at any rate there was no point in formality around Garrus, who wouldn't care even if he did notice. The shirt was clean only because he'd offered to do her laundry — much like she was trimming her hair only because he'd asked about it.

Garrus snorted. "Twenty years of incompetent assholes telling you what to do?" He shook his head. "Civilian life's the life for me."

"Nice try, big guy, but you might as well have 'ASK ME ABOUT MY SERVICE RECORD' tattooed on your forehead." He operated just fine without any oversight, and she knew that he chafed under strict regulations, but for someone who thought of himself as a bad turian, he was in many ways the model of his species — devoted to duty above all else, a force on the battlefield and an honorable man in every other setting. "You're about as civilian as Hackett in a dress uniform."

She was nearing the delicate work around her left ear, and her hand started to shake. It was a small, fine tremor, but for someone who had crafted her life's work around the steadiness of her hands, it was catastrophic. She compartmentalized, took a deep breath, and didn't flinch when the razor slipped and dragged across the back of her ear. Garrus didn't even notice. If she'd been able to watch herself in the mirror, she might've managed despite the tremor, but she never caught her own gaze except out of the corner of her eye in these antebellum days.

Whole galaxies had once swung on the pivot of Shepard's confidence. There was something dark and deep and inexorable in her, something quick and hungry, something so reasonably, ruthlessly pragmatic that it carved the humanity right out of her. That part of her was both rational and instinctive at once; it wasn't why she'd kept fighting, but it was why she'd…

Her hand locked up. She could still feel it, but it didn't obey her command to _move_. Half a heartbeat later, she realized that Garrus had reached out and wrapped his fingers around her wrist. 

"Shepard. You're bleeding," he said.

There were other parts of her that had once believed with all the fervor of a fanatic: not in the sovereignty of humanity, but in its potential — not in the superiority of the Council, but in the strength of diversity.

"Let go."

The realization of her weakness ate at her. She knew about shellshock and PTSD and the complex coping mechanisms she'd had since she was sixteen; she knew how easy it was to depersonalize, to bury the self, to become a siege engine so wholly that conflict became religion; she had an intellectual understanding of the fracture mechanics of the mind; but all of that paled against the gut knowledge that her mother would be disappointed in her.

"Here, let me — "

Shepard had grown up on stories of her mother's service. At no point in her life had she wanted to be anything other than what she was; being a Marine was not her vocation but her calling, so bred into her identity that she couldn't imagine who she would be without it. And she wanted that back. She wanted that sureness, that confidence, that sense of purpose. She wanted to be a soldier again, not this flinching timebomb who no longer recognized everything she had once held sacred and familiar. 

"I said _let go_."

"Shepard — "

"Fuck _off_ , Garrus," Shepard said, because there was nothing too sacred to sacrifice to the pyre of her war.


	8. Chapter 8

He didn't creep around her black mood, didn't treat her delicately, didn't draw her out: Garrus knew her better than that, or at least he knew her as well as she allowed herself to be known. He left her to her stoicism, and it was there, in the cage she had built for herself, that Shepard rotted. 

They hit their final stop before the last leg of the trip to Suru early in the day, or at least early according to the Citadel Standard Time they still used for reckoning. The Citadel was gone, and the Council had revived itself on New Eden Prime, but no one had yet bothered to establish a new galactic standard, and CST was close enough to both human and turian diurnal rhythms that neither of them suffered a noticeable loss in operational efficiency by following it. 

What Shepard hadn't said was that allowing their sleep cycles to sync was almost intolerably indulgent. Ideally, with only two of them on board the _Valkyrie_ , they'd be running four five-hour shifts, two on and two off, with one of them always on watch while the other was sleeping; but there hadn't seemed to be any point to it, not when they were no longer running a military operation, not when they had so many long days of travel with only each other for company, not when Shepard felt so keenly the waste of sleeping when Garrus was awake. 

At any rate, her sleep cycle had slipped so far past controllable that it no longer resembled a cycle — in the service, she'd slept whenever she had the time, and fallen into a solid five hours a night whenever she had the luxury, but now she went days without resting and made up for the deficit by binging. Six hours became ten became fourteen, until she slept through an entire day and woke panting and restless and as tired as if she'd never slept at all.

It was easier to sleep in deep space. On Illium she had fasted, sleeping only when her body had forced her hand, but from Osun to Suru was a twelve-day cruise, and on the first day she went to bed exhausted and woke exhausted again. For an hour she sat, numb, in the chair beside her bunk, and then she fell into it again. It was easier to sleep in deep space, but deep space brought the grimmest dreams, and her anticipation meant she would jerk back to consciousness every time she felt slumber crawl over her. She focused on the pain in her hands to distract herself. The knuckles were swollen and scabbed from boxing, the sinews tight and tender from shooting; her pain was sharp and clean or a dull ache by turns, and the molten constancy of it grounded her…

Shepard dreamed in black, the dark caverns of Torfan and the deeper void between stars, and in red, the stain beneath her father's head and the terrible light of the Reapers; she dreamed of being buried, and those were the best dreams, when weight crushed her down on all sides, suffocated her until she slipped away gently, not to an afterlife but to simple nonexistence. She never dreamed in green. She dreamed in the great gray grief of failure and in the glaring white nova of exposure; and where most people were spectators in their dreams, canvas rather than painter, she was never granted the absolution of responsibility. In Shepard's dreams, people did not _die_. In Shepard's dreams, people _were killed_.

And sometimes she dreamed in blue, and those were the worst dreams of all; nothing made her loathe herself like dreaming in blue...


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've neglected to mention that my title was inspired by the song "Anyway You Choose to Give It" by the Black Ghosts. Whoops!

But even the sainted Garrus Vakarian had his limits. Shepard figured that out for herself after she woke from a blue dream and went to the galley to self-medicate; Garrus found her there with a glass and a dwindling fifth of Rigellian whiskey. She was not an alcoholic. She was, however, a Marine, an insomniac, and an enhanced human with a superior constitution. She was not an alcoholic; but sometimes she drank.

"Shepard," Garrus said. His brows rose. "Starting the party early?"

"Twelve days of cruising," Shepard said. "Not the same as shore leave, but not exactly heavy duty."

He was wearing loose clothing — turian loungewear — rather than the fitted suits that were more fashionable for public appearances. His sleeves ended just past his elbows, and she found herself scowling in concentration at the long, uncovered expanse of his forearms as he hunted through his MREs for a dish that looked palatable. Garrus was lean, almost sinewy, and when he ripped into a package she could see the corded muscles in his arms bunch and flex. He was so efficient with three fingers that her own five-fingered hands abruptly seemed clumsy and even wasteful in design.

Shepard was not a particularly tactile person. She was a tough child and a tougher adult. After her family's deaths, she'd flinched away from anyone who offered comfort, and then, later, when the raw bleeding weight of the loss had been buried under scar tissue, she'd learned to act like she neither needed nor wanted that solace. At eighteen, right after signing her enlistment paperwork, she'd picked up her first sexual partner; she'd learned the woman's name but not much else about her, and that night had set the precedent for her romantic involvements. Quick, clean, anonymous, avoiding much by way of laughter or connection or even sensuous indulgence. Shepard liked sex, but she liked it less than boxing. The fascination she felt for Garrus was new to her.

Her friends she allowed a certain liberty of contact, but as she advanced through the ranks, even that she started to limit. Command demanded excellence, and excellence separated you from your peers; and it demanded authority, which meant being part of a squad but above them. Hyper-vigilance was another limiting factor — it faded in and out of Shepard's life, but during the worse periods she startled easily and often, so aware of and reactant to everything around her that sometimes she just wanted to climb into a sensory deprivation tank for a week. 

She was aware of all of these exigencies. From the age of sixteen right up through the present she met regularly with whichever psychologist had been assigned to her. At first, the appointments were recommended by the trauma center that had briefly taken her in after Mindoir, and then they were a requirement demanded of all Alliance Navy personnel. Shepard, however, was not interested in self-explication. She was satisfied with high scores in the classroom and on the field, with good feedback from her commanding officers, and with her continued survival from one day to the next, and she was smart enough to know what the psychologists wanted to hear. Shepard was functional; the Navy agreed; that was all that mattered.

Shepard was functional, but she was beginning to think she was touch-starved.

She didn't like thinking about it; it was soppy and weak, if scientifically valid, and it was, more importantly, not a problem Shepard could solve on her own. For the past two decades, she had been touched more often with violent than with gentle intent. When the suspicion had dawned on her shortly after her release from the hospital, she'd thought first about addressing the issue with sex and then, more embarrassingly, with a massage, but there was something so desperate, so revoltingly humiliating, about the entire problem, that she'd done her best to forget about it.

Meanwhile, Garrus brought his MRE over the table and slid into the seat across from her. He started picking over his food unenthusiastically; small wonder, when it looked like some kind of shellfish and smelled like some kind of piss. One of them really needed to learn how to cook.

"Have you eaten yet?"

Shepard toasted him.

"Ah," said Garrus, and then he looked at her. There was a meter and a half of space between them.

"I know what I'm doing, Vakarian."

"...Yeah," Garrus said. "Yeah, Shepard, I know you do. But that doesn't make it any easier."

"No," Shepard agreed.

"And that doesn't mean you can stop."

"No," Shepard said, because he was right: she knew what she was doing to herself, she saw it with clear eyes, but knowledge and even self-knowledge were no cure, no panacea that would lift her doubt and banish her dreams, absolve her of guilt and grant her the mercy and forgiveness she didn't deserve. Knowledge was a candle against the dark, and that was all, and the dark was vast and indifferent and unknowable.

"No," Shepard said, "it doesn't."

And that was the first day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _And I can think of a few things to say to make things right_   
>  _But by the time I say them we will be in different light_   
>  _Please appreciate the limits of the flesh_   
>  _The spirit will not rest, will not be satisfied with anybody else._


	10. Chapter 10

Eventually, finally, she started going through her inbox. She usually put the chore off until the later days of longer cruises, but her correspondence was starting to pile up to the point that it was untenable despite the limited AI she'd purchased to sort through the less important messages, which meant Shepard had to attend to the problem herself. 

The _Valkyrie_ was shaped like a 'V' that was flattened at the sides; at the very fore of the ship, just behind the snub nose, was the bridge, and behind that was the operations center with the communications hub and what Shepard still thought of as a war table. Aft of the operations center was the galley. The head, quarters, and the storage space they'd converted into a gym and rec area were snugged up against the _Valkyrie_ 's belly, beneath ops. To the very rear of the ship was the hold, with its armory and twin airlocks and whatever cargo they happened to be hauling.

She and Garrus both had workstations in ops, and it was there that she sat to read her messages. Garrus was banging around in the hold, doing god-knew-what. Part of her wanted to find him, but the urgency of that impulse also set her skin to crawling. She ignored him and thoughts of him and deleted another request from the Systems Alliance instead. _"Commander, will you…" "Commander, would you…" "Commander, sources indicate…" "Commander, you are due…"_ Miraculously, there were even one or two addressed to her correct title: _"Agent, the Council requests…"_ 'Commander' Shepard was what she'd been in soundbites from the war, and 'Commander' Shepard was probably what some politician with an agenda was going to carve on her headstone.

She deleted everything addressed to Commander Shepard that didn't contain necessary intel. Half the inbox emptied itself. What remained were a handful of receipts and operations messages that primarily concerned the ship or her equipment, a brief note from Solana Vakarian, a follow-up from Diana Allers, three priority bulletins from ST&R and one from the STG that had almost certainly been forwarded to Shepard against the wishes of the salarian government, a copy of the last shopping list she and Garrus had put together, and a letter from Ash.

Shepard deleted the shopping list, too. She opened the message from Allers ("...saw the article about you and Agent Vakarian in the _Milky Way Weekly_ ; let me know if you need any help spinning the situation…"), closed it, opened the message from her STG contact, skimmed it without absorbing any of the words, closed _that_ , and finally opened the message from Williams.

It was brief, as most of her letters were; Ash was currently serving as the captain of the SR-2 _Normandy_ , overlooking a number of special tasks but assigned primarily to monitoring and recovering Reaper technology. Joker was still at the ship's helm. It hurt something inside of Shepard — a deep, primitive ache that was not quite homesickness and not quite possessiveness and not quite professional envy — but with the hurt came the gladness of knowing that the _Normandy_ was in good hands, that Williams was finally being given the respect she had earned, and that Shepard herself no longer had charge of that sleek, deadly warbird and all the hope and fear and gravity it carried with it.

_Shepard,_

(Occasionally, Ash started her letters with _MA'AM_ , always in all caps like that, because she was a sarcastic P.O.S. who liked making her commanding officers lose composure and start sniggering. Only once had she addressed Shepard as 'Admiral,' and that had been to her face during Shepard's final tour of the _Normandy_. She'd dropped the ranks ever since.)

_Just saw the notice from ST &R directing that all intel concerning the Quisling be forwarded to you and Vakarian. You two snapped that one up pretty quick. Good luck finding him; the guy's a snake, and sounds like he'll be just as hard to catch as one, too. I have EDI keeping her ear to the ground. She'll be in contact if she finds anything._

_We've been working closely with the geth on our latest assignment — can't tell you any more, you know how it goes, but I've been thinking over some of the stuff you told me about Legion and about your experiences with the Collective. I'm never going to work as easily with synthetics as I do with real, flesh-and-blood people. Blame the Reapers if you want. (I do. For more than I should, probably.) That said, working this closely with them has definitely broadened my view of their usefulness and our our ability to build an alliance rather than just existing in a state of cycling detente. You're always forcing me to reexamine my assumptions. It's hell on the ego, ma'am._

_The downside is that we have a couple of Alliance ghosts 'observing' us. One of them's a real nonhacker — we ended up in the middle of a situation yesterday, no shots fired, but she just about pissed her pants. God save all of us from oversight._

_Sarah's good, thanks for asking. She keeps bugging me to take some leave to visit her, but I already burned through most of my hours helping Liara set up her new place. Wipe that smirk off your face, Skipper. Nothing to report on that front._

_Tell Garrus I said hey and that he'd better be watching your back. Are you guys following the Balogh trial? Joker's taking bets on the outcome._

_Gotta run. Talk to you soon._

_Ash_

_ THIS MESSAGE ORIGINATED FROM AN ALLIANCE MILITARY NETWORK. IT HAS BEEN CENSORED AT THE TRANSMISSION SOURCE FOR SECURITY PURPOSES. ANY REPLY MAY BE READ BY MILITARY AUTHORITIES. _

"Anything interesting?" Garrus asked.

Shepard started. He was just inside the hatch, and a sudden fist of outrage bloomed in her chest at his appearance. Outrage at herself, for her poor situational awareness? Or at him, for making her feel comfortable enough to drop her guard? She wasn't sure, but being forced into further self-examination had never made her feel less angry before and sure as hell didn't now.

She set the anger aside. "Letter. From Williams."

"Yeah?" He walked over to her and leaned over her shoulder to peer at the screen. He always looked a little bare to her without his visor, but there was no reason for him to wear it aboard the ship — although he did, sometimes, maybe so he could listen to his music without Shepard giving him shit for his taste — and when he bent close to her, she was hit with the full force of his eyes even though he wasn't looking at her. They were stellar eyes, blueshift eyes, always falling towards her but never within reach… He smelled like sweat, old socks, and clean soap, and his throat and the line of his jaw were dangerously close and vulnerable. Shepard leaned away.

He shifted automatically to give her more space and kept reading. "The Balogh trial?" he said. "I'm surprised she would…" He glanced down at Shepard, who met his gaze with a hard stare of her own. Vulnerability was not a state with which Shepard was comfortable.

Victoria Balogh was the leader of a colonist militia that had mustered during the height of the war. The colony itself, Kurzon, had been… 'populous' was an understatement; it was a boom world. Residency applications had tripled in the past decade and quadrupled after Jormangund Technology opened a large munitions complex planetside with an orbital platform above for zero-g testing. Kurzon had also been in the direct and immediate path of the Reapers, and Balogh had read the writing on the wall; when the colony had fallen, she'd packed a spaceship full of essential personnel and then glassed the capital behind her using the Jormangund Orbital Platform's experimental high-energy canons. 

Millions had died; and now Balogh was being brought to trial while the media played coy questions about kinder fates and war crimes. 

"It's fine," Shepard said. 

"It isn't," Garrus countered. "There's a hell of a lot of difference between what you did in the Bahak System and what Balogh did to her own people. You bought us time, Shepard — gave us a chance to fight. Balogh took that chance away."

"Did she?" said Shepard. "Did I? Destroying the Alpha Relay only bought us a couple of months." She laughed lowly, but her laughter was devoid of amusement. "And better dead than a husk. We've both said it."

"So what? Should we drag you back to Earth? Put you on trial?" Garrus said. "You did what needed to be done. War is utilitarian."

"That renders a thousand treaties governing sentient rights during wartime void," Shepard argued. 

"Now you're just being stubborn. You can't draw a comparison between fighting the Reapers and fighting any other species, and — damn it, Shepard, I know you aren't arguing against consequentialism when I watched you win a war that the Council refused to acknowledge until it was an all-out invasion on the basis of your ability to make hard calls."

" _Hard calls_? You're going to lecture me about _hard calls_? Maybe they should put me on trial. They were going to before the invasion. People have been talking about it again. And it's not just Aratoht. I've done, the things I've — what I've _wanted_ — " And then she heard herself, whining like a child, like someone who could indulge in regret, like war and survival hadn't been the work of her whole life.

"You didn't second-guess yourself like this during the war."

Shepard, furious again, snapped, "How would you know?"

It hung there between them — not her anger, or his, but rather her denial of the intimacy he thought he was allowed. She had the _pleasure_ of watching him shut down in pieces; his mandibles and mouth pressed tight, his back straightened, and then, last of all, his eyes shuttered. The Vakarian adage: _We repay in kind._

"Fine," he said. "Fine, Shepard. Consider it dropped." He whirled and started for the hatch, but as soon as he reached it, he turned around and stalked back to her. Shepard kept her face glassy, set, deliberate; she couldn't tell if it took her effort or not.

"But you know what, Shepard?" he said. "If they do come for you — if they take you and lock you up again for doing what no one else would? They'll have to step over my corpse to do it." And he turned and walked away.

Shepard, who was sick to death of being herself, sat there in his absence until she was empty; and then she went to the hold and took out her pistol and started her dry-firing exercises all over again.

And that was the second day.


	11. Chapter 11

The next day was different. The next day she was wrapping her hands in medi-gel compression tape when he woke up — not a fighter's wrap, but supportive bandaging. She'd finished her left hand without trouble, but the right was giving her problems, both because of the ache that made her fingers clumsy and because she was working with her non-dominant hand. She was still struggling with it when the hatch to Garrus' quarters hissed open. 

His footsteps halted, and then he shifted his weight and exhaled heavily through his nose. "Having trouble, Shepard?"

"I've got it. Just a little — " She dropped the tail of the bandage. "Dammit."

"Oh, you've got _everything_ under control." 

His tone was… diffident, she decided, and after yesterday, who could blame him? She offered up a wry smile and finally let her eyes rise to meet his. Garrus wasn't precisely what she'd call a caretaker, but he was attentive to the people around him — it was partly that sniper's instinct for absorbing the landscape and partly a trait born of his diligence, and she respected him more because he cultivated consideration than she would've if he'd come by it naturally. "Laugh it up, Vakarian," she shot back. "Are you going to stand there decorating the wall, or are you going to help?"

And he was — there was no denying this — abnormally attentive to _her_. She could've read a hundred, a thousand things into the way Garrus treated her; imagination was Shepard's gift and her albatross. That creativity was at the root of her skill at warfare, her spatial reasoning, even her uncanny knack for reading people… but it was balanced by a kind of brutal pragmatism that had been purchased with the only real currency the universe recognized. 

Garrus was loyal to her, because he was a loyal man; and he was indebted to her, because he honored his debts. He was wrong on all counts, of course. Whatever debt he thought he owed her had been paid in full when he followed her into hell, and his loyalty — well, that was a better trick. Subordinate to CO, two soldiers together in a foxhole… but they were friends, too, outside of their shared history; he hadn't been the only one to follow her into hell, but he was the one she sought out for a game of gin, for a couple of hours swapping shit at the shooting range, for dinner and debriefings, for a night sorting through crew evals, and he was the one who'd stayed. Friend, comrade, second — there was maybe a little of his old hero-worship in there, too, and a more-than-generous measure of pity. 'Partners' was probably the right word: like they were two detectives at C-Sec working the homicide beat.

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," he drawled. "All right, Shepard — here, hold still." He took her arm by the wrist and pulled it gently away from her body. The bandages slipped until they were hanging in loose loops; Garrus freed her arm and then rolled the tape back up into a tidy ball. "Easier to start from scratch," he said, and Shepard glanced up at him and then away, baring the corner of her jaw in the process. "Unless you'd rather have all your circulation cut off…?"

"Hell, if I lose the arm, I'll be half-robot," Shepard said, and as she'd hoped, he chuckled. 

"I seem to recall you telling me you were already a machine. Something about the mechanical perfection of your aim, was it?"

"Sounds more like your line, Garrus. Remember when we…" She bit off her sentence when he reached her bare wrist. The skin was thin there, so thin she could follow the path of her median vein beneath the pale flesh, and the abrasive drag of Garrus's fingertips carved a line of feedback up her arm straight to the base of her skull. 

"When we what?" he prompted.

"You dragged me up to the top of the Citadel to shoot bottles."

"We all have our impulsive moments."

"You're nothin' _but_ impulsive moments, Vakarian," Shepard said. He'd reached her knuckles and was tying the bandage off; she was swaddled in the supportive wrap from her elbow to the base of her fingers, and already she could feel the medi-gel sinking into muscle. Her sense of touch was dulled, maybe even a little numb, but she didn't lose track of where Garrus was holding her.

"Hypocrisy, from a Spectre?" 

"Can you imagine?"

Garrus smoothed the tape flat over her palm; the side of his mouth twitched in amusement, but there was tension there, too, and something that wasn't quite concern in the way he stepped closer to look at her. "Not in a million years," he said.

She hated him a little, for the low, private intent of his voice, and for the way he stumbled over the word _million_. Not like two homicide detectives, she realized; that was an intimacy of the mind, born of familiarity and unity of purpose, but this went beyond purpose — not unity but union. This was the tenth hour spent nestled in a cradle of grass with your spotter, one rifle passed between you as you rolled over each other to trade places at the scope. This was breathing against his neck, sleeping against his side, sensing rather than seeing when his finger slid against the trigger. 

Shepard let herself wonder how he would feel between her thighs. She swallowed the thought before it could steal across her face, but some muscle-memory of yearning must have remained, because Garrus blinked once, twice, and his head listed in question. He was taller than her; Shepard usually stayed a measured distance from larger beings, not out of wariness but because not having to look _up_ could be a useful psychological tool. Garrus was taller than she was, though, and he was too close —

She lifted her chin and met his gaze dead-on. "About yesterday," she said.

"Shepard..."

"What, not going to let me apologize?" He stiffened, his body straightening away from her; before he had curved towards her so gently she hadn't realized he'd been falling towards her at all. "I can say it, Vakarian," she added, although she wasn't sure what she meant: _Even I make mistakes,_ or _I especially make mistakes_ , or maybe _I can't really say it._ Let him read whatever meaning he wanted. She'd give even odds anyway on whether he blew her off ( _No, Shepard, you don't_ ) or dragged the words out of her ( _Pride goeth_ ).

"You haven't been sleeping well," he said instead, and Shepard blinked — the only symptom of surprise she allowed herself.

Did he want her strong or weak? Did he subscribe to her view of weakness, that asking for help should be reserved for times of dire functional need, or to some other, more forgiving school of thought that didn't equate isolation with valor? It bothered her that she didn't know what he wanted in even this one small instance. The reading she'd done on turian psychology was very often useless when her subject was textbook half the time but abnormal in most of the ways that counted.

"Running low on fuel. I'm not sure how you aren't — we pulled more than a few all-nighters on that last assignment. It was worth it, don't get me wrong, but I could go for a couple of days on that tropical island now." 

"You haven't been sleeping well since London."

"Come on, Garrus — " She might as well have been looking down the barrel of a gun at him for how obvious he was, for how he responded to the smallest portion of openness. He'd changed; or maybe the difference now was that she finally had the full, oppressive weight of his attention. "Shit. Fine."

"You don't have to — "

"No. You're right, I haven't." She pulled away and started packing up the first aid kit; the supplies were spread all over the weight bench, because the medi-gel tape had been buried near the bottom, but Garrus didn't try to help her. That was the other edge of the sword, that was what terrified her — that he could read her as well as she could read him.

"Have you talked to a doctor?"

She put the medical scissors next to the laser knife and then hid both beneath a bottle of eye wash. "No."

And then he asked, the bastard. "Will you?"

"Worried about our operational efficiency? Don't worry, we're still the prettiest Spectres on the roster — "

"Worried about you," he said, careful, so careful of her that her skin crawled.

The single-use packets of medi-gel ointment went next, and then the latex gloves. Their first aid kit was really a repurposed medic's bag that held not only the usual store of supplies but also a number of specialty items, like anaphylaxis autoinjectors to deal with Garrus's allergy to a particular family of salarian plants and spare microparts for Shepard's synthetic leg. A more romantic person might have found something poignant about that — all their weaknesses bound up together — but Shepard's concerns were more practical. She added the splints, the sanitizer, and finally the extra heat sinks before flipping the lid closed and activating the magnetic locks. The kit hissed as the hermetic seal activated.

"If you think I should go," she said, "then I'll go."

"New Eden, when we're done on Suru?" Garrus said. "I'll make an appointment. Maybe we can swing by Tuchanka after that, before we ship out again. See how the galaxy's most prolific krogan is doing."

"You know he'd take that as a compliment."

"Which is why I'd never say it to his face."

"Sure you wouldn't," Shepard said.

"New Eden?" Garrus prompted.

"Yeah, all right. I'll see if I can get a recommendation from Chakwas." Her tone suggested she was making a concession, but Garrus had won this round, and they both knew it. When she passed him carrying the first aid kit, she bumped her shoulder against his side: _Thanks for watching my six._ He cupped her elbow in return: _You don't always make it easy._

He cleared his throat. "Breakfast?"

"Yes sir, mess sergeant," she said, and Garrus chuckled and she smirked back at him and the air was clear, light, fine, always fine. She took the first aid kit back to the hold by herself. This was the largest empty space on the ship — not cavernous, the way the _Normandy_ 's hold had been, but still hollow, holding only a few crates of equipment and their small armory off to the side. When the hatch had sealed behind her, she braced her hands against the workbench, doubled over, and breathed.

She couldn't have run the mission better if she'd wanted. Her plan was precise and her execution flawless, from the calculated way she'd slanted her head to expose the corner of her jaw ( _Comparative Body Language in Bipedal Sentients_ , T'Kira & Arkesh, p. 321: "While steady eye contact between humans indicates trust, turians interpret an averted gaze as a sign of trustworthiness… When a turian simultaneously exposes part of the throat or jaw, their averted gaze may also mark vulnerability") to her subtle evocation of their history ("Remember when we...?"). Banter, need, concession, accepting his help, reminding him that she trusted his judgment, her implicit apology, even her protest — that had been tricky, acting avoidant enough that she wouldn't seem uncharacteristic but not enough to shut down his line of questioning — the entire interaction was _scripted_ , choreographed and directed and orchestrated by Shepard and Shepard's greed and the black pit that spun behind Shepard's ribs.

She wasn't sorry. One of her gifts as a leader was a talent for marrying honesty and manipulation; she could see what people wanted and how to use it against them, she could see what they feared and amplify or soothe their fear as the situation required. The soldiers she served with were never anything other than weights and measures, assets she could use in her brutal calculus as she carved a straight line from conflict to victory. Sometimes they were real to her, and even dear; and sometimes she couldn't allow them to be real. 

Shepard was rotting from the inside out, but she couldn't let Garrus leave. It was mercenary of her, not the worst thing she'd ever done but certainly the most selfish. Too many days like yesterday, though, and even his vast river of patience would run dry. Sometimes she thought she made a better Vakarian than he did. _We repay in kind_ was not enough for Shepard, who returned her debts a thousandfold, who would burn whole worlds to the ground and salt the earth behind her if it meant getting what she wanted. 

She hated herself, but she wasn't sorry. Shepard may not have wanted his comfort, but the thought of facing tomorrow without his presence was suffocating; so she would keep running her campaign, keep binding him to her, keep reminding him that he owed her, keep pretending that he was better with the woman who'd saved the galaxy at his side. She purchased his company with the currency of her pain. It never occurred to her that she could have simply asked him to stay.

And that was the third day.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ETA: I realized a little too late that this chapter should probably have a content warning. There’s nothing drastically out of line with the tone of the rest of the story, but there is a scene in this chapter where Shepard realizes that she doesn’t mind when Garrus lands a hit when they’re sparring, and the realization is framed in fairly depressing terms. I’m not sure if you’d call it self-harm or manipulation or both, but it’s dark, it’s there, and it’s part of an overall arc about Shepard’s mental health and slow crawl towards recovery.

He never asked what had happened in that last, desperate hour as she hung over London, and because the only person she'd consider telling hadn't asked, there was no one who knew the whole story. In the hospital while hurry-up-and-waiting between bouts of nerve grafts for her new biomechanical leg, Shepard had been sure the Alliance would at least send an intelligence agent to collect an account of whatever she admitted to remembering; but instead they'd left her alone, and eventually she'd concluded that the brass considered that unaccounted period of time between Admiral Anderson's death and the Citadel's explosion self-explanatory. The Crucible had functioned as it was supposed to function, and the Navy was fond of functionality.

And since Garrus never asked, Shepard carried the weight of that hour by herself. She carried it around her neck like a mariner, across her shoulders like an Atlas; she carried it like she carried Kaidan Alenko and James Vega and three hundred thousand batarians who had lived in the Bahak System. Even if Garrus asked to share a portion of that burden, she wasn't sure she would let him take up what was hers and hers alone to bear. The weight of that hour shamed her, but the unrelenting business of living swept her towards something that could in the right light resemble acceptance.

Garrus was reading on the couch when she finished updating the Valkyrie's financial records and going over their operating costs for the month. The Council paid its Spectres generously, and war heroes didn't want for money, but Shepard had only lived as long as she had because of her ability to ration her resources. It helped that Garrus was better at repairing their equipment than any professional gunsmith; Shepard herself was decent enough at maintaining and upgrading her rifles, but Garrus could take a third-hand Elkoss Combine M-8 and rebuild it so it fired like something straight out of the Spectres' special stocks. 

The greatest expense was the Valkyrie herself — both the cost of keeping her in the sky, and the cost of all the registration fees and docking licenses required to fly her legally from one side of the galaxy to the other. The communications array cost a hell of a lot to maintain, too, since it was as advanced a system as it was possible to fit on a ship of this size. After the ship and the armory came all the other expenses of living: food for both of them, armor and ammunition, clothes and weight equipment and toiletries. 

There were medical costs, too, and not only the bills from patching one or the other of them up when some mercenary bullet punched through their shields; Garrus's jaw was held together with microfilament implants, and his hearing on the right side had slowly failed him until surgeons had artificially reconstructed his entire aural canal. Shepard, meanwhile, was as much machine as woman. Miranda would've probably been able to better integrate her newer prosthetic leg with the older work done by Cerberus, but Shepard managed. Maybe she'd mention it one day; maybe she wouldn't. At any rate, they required periodic check-ups from a bevy of specialists, although they both dragged their feet when it came to making those appointments.

"Reading anything good?" Shepard asked.

"Mhmm," Garrus said. "News from Palaven. They're holding open debates for the entire month."

"You asked to speak?"

"Yeah, I was, but I registered an absence. They don't really expect me to show up anyway, not when I haven't set foot on the planet for a year and a half." At this point, Garrus could publicly denounce the Hierarchy and it wouldn't put a dint in his citizenship tier; not visiting Palaven for a year or two wasn't going to stop the Primarch's office from personally issuing him a priority invitation to the debates.

"What's the referendum?"

He set aside his tablet to scratch his jaw. Shepard leaned over the back of the couch and picked it up. _'A BETRAYAL OF THE TURIAN SPIRIT?'_ read the headline. _'HIERARCHY INVITES DEBATE OF MANDATORY MILITARY SERVICE.'_

"They're talking about abolishing it?"

"It's been mentioned," Garrus said. "Probably a hell of a lot more often than Victus anticipated. The original proposal was about shortening the duration of mandatory from fifteen years down to ten. They invited you to speak too, by the way."

"Look at you turians, pretending to be part of the galactic community." She was ribbing Garrus, but it was true that the turians unashamedly prioritized turian pursuits; while the galaxy was deep in the throes of antebellum reconstruction, Palaven's leaders still controlled enough military forces that very few criticized them for their self-interest. Although at least the Hierarchy made a nod in the direction of multilateral unity.

"That's part of it," he said, "but popular sentiment towards humans is still surprisingly high." 

"I didn't expect it to last this long after the war," Shepard admitted. In the decades after the Relay 314 Incident, Earth and Palaven had reached the impasse of a stiffly serviceable diplomatic relationship, but after the Reapers they might even be called friendly. Part of that was shared sympathy; the Reapers had targeted Earth and Palaven first and had brought the heaviest amassment of their forces to bear in those sectors. Palaven had also unexpectedly extended an open hand to Tuchanka. Meanwhile, the salarians had withdrawn behind their borders while the asari, usually first to spearhead a coalition, had neither isolated nor involved themselves in the new galactic order beyond what was necessary to maintain a seat on the Council, although Shepard doubted that would last.

"Give it a few years, Shepard," Garrus drawled, "and we'll all go right back to hating each other." He tipped his head backwards to look at her upside-down; his fringe brushed the back of the couch. "Up for a few rounds?"

"Think you can take me, Vakarian?" Shepard said, which was as good as a yes. His posture was relaxed, his tone easy; his gaze was watchful, but not penetrating — not like he thought she would vanish if he let her out of his sight. Good.

He rolled easily to his feet, leaving behind an indent on the couch cushion in the shape of his ass that proved he had well and truly settled into their quarters on the ship. "You know, a lot of people have asked me that over the years. Too bad none of them are still around for you to find out how it worked out for them."

"Laugh it up, Garrus," Shepard said, and then, stretching her forearm extensors as she walked, she led the way up the stairs and into the aft hold. This was part of it, too: when Shepard wanted to fight, she found a gym and stayed until exhaustion won or the line of challengers approached zero, but when Garrus wanted to fight, they went into the hold and dragged out the mats and went at each other. Why she preferred the anonymity of a gym, Shepard couldn't have said; Garrus was in many ways the perfect sparring partner. Fast, smart, agile, strong, proficient in a host of techniques… in addition to his skill at marksmanship, he was a ranking hand-to-hand specialist, something he'd never alluded to on the SR-1 but had been comfortable enough to boast about more than once by the time she'd picked him up on the SR-2. "Everybody has a hobby, Shepard," he'd told her.

They were well-matched, too, but despite that, Shepard found herself increasingly averse to these one-on-one sessions. The tension, maybe; however one-sided it was, stepping inside his guard, letting him inside hers, touching him and being touched and trusting him to hit hard enough to challenge but not hard enough to debilitate her — it all set her on edge and would probably continue to set her on edge until she had a better handle on what she felt.

Neither of them wore pads. They had a VI program that monitored their matches and awarded a point for each time one of them tagged or pinned the other, which was supposed to eliminate the need for potentially dangerous strikes but in reality merely curbed the possibility of risk. Garrus was trained in a couple of styles; all turians started out their mandatory service learning the basics of CST, combat strike training, and after that he'd picked up illisus from the staff sergeant of his platoon. Once he'd transferred to civilian life on the Citadel, he'd had both C-Sec's standard coaching and training with an asari matriarch in closed fist and open palm. Shepard's only systematic instruction had been in AMAP — Alliance Martial Arts Program — but she'd been brawling for years, both in a boxing ring and outside of it, and no matter where she'd been stationed, she'd always found a couple of other marines who could teach her some Krav Maga or Muay Thai or huntress technique.

Shepard maintained that the only style she needed was AMAP. Garrus had made it his mission in life to prove her wrong.

"Sure you don't want to spend some time on the treadmill, Shepard?"

"Just give me a couple of minutes to stretch," Shepard said. Turians warmed up faster than humans for reasons that were beyond Shepard's scientific understanding. Her specialty was application, and in this application what she knew was that if she followed Garrus's warm-up, she'd be paying for it tomorrow. He dropped into a series of stretches himself but finished well before she did, so he started to shadowbox his way across the hold. Garrus usually moved with a slow, and yes, cocky, inevitability. Seeing him like this, fast but no less powerful for his speed, was a hell of a thing.

While he was occupied, Shepard took her time working through her routine. Her body had held together pretty damn well for what it had been through — rapid decompression and brain trauma were only the start of the list — and her cybernetics helped compensate for wear and tear, but she was approaching forty, not yet middle-aged but increasingly aware that nobody's joints worked perfectly forever. Today in particular an old leg injury was bothering her; she'd taken a slug just above the knee on a long-ago mission, and sometimes the muscle tissue around the scar was tight enough to throw her off. And now there was the extra consideration of her cybernetic leg, which affected her balance even more; but she managed.

"Ready," she said, when her heart rate had jumped from what in a baseline human would be dangerously low to what a professional athlete would display at rest.

Garrus threw a final right-jab-left-cross and sauntered back to the mats. "Last chance to back out… _Jane."_

Shepard smirked and settled into a ready stance and said, "Bring it, _Vakarian."_ This was good. She felt like herself: balanced, ready, combative. The Shepard of the past year had been too often the opposite: shrinking, unstable, selfish. Maybe this was good. Maybe this, a match, the clean pain of a hit, maybe this was what she needed.

"Valkyrie. Activate sparring program alpha," Shepard said.

"Program activated," the ship replied, and then Garrus was coming at her, high and fast, trying to catch her off-guard. She ducked under one blow, deflected, deflected, and caught a knee strike with both hands; in a real fight she wouldn't have tried that, since it would have caused bone fractures or outright breaks, but Garrus wasn't coming at her with the force he would use in a battlefield engagement. In a practice match, her hand block did the trick of throwing him off balance. She shoved down on his knee, which pitched his torso towards her... and then she drove the top of her head into his chin.

He staggered backward before catching himself. "Crap, Shepard," he said. "You realize you're not actually a krogan, right?"

"I don't know about that. You've seen how many breeding requests I get."

Garrus grumbled something under his breath. He was stripped down to his waist to mirror her sweatpants and sports bra; neither of them were wearing shoes, either, and when he scratched at his keel, it drew her attention to the burn scarring that licked down the right side of his neck and chest.

"Ready?" he said.

"Ready," said Shepard, and she braced herself to get hit.

There was an art to it. There was an art to taking a punch. She was gifted at it; if Commander Shepard knew nothing else, she knew sacrifice. But she wasn't Commander Shepard anymore, wasn't even Admiral Shepard, certainly wasn't Lieutenant Shepard or Sergeant Shepard or Private Third Class Shepard. She wasn't Jane. Jane had been on Mindoir.

When she braced herself, it wasn't conscious. Nobody _allowed_ themselves to be hit when they were sparring, not unless they were demonstrating a technique. Nor was it muscle memory that made her tense. Muscle memory was what steadied her when she lowered her stance; muscle memory was what drove her punches from the hip; muscle memory was what turned practice into reflex. This was neither conscious impulse nor honed instinct. It came from somewhere deeper, more animal in the raw strength of it but more sentient in its complexity.

Garrus dropped his gaze. Shepard, normally too experienced to fall for an eye feint, looked down. In that hair-second of a lapse, he hit her in the face.

His cross wasn't hard enough to bruise her. It was barely more than a tap. She'd hit him like that herself, a pop right in the jaw as a reward for not paying attention, and he'd returned the favor more than once. It was fine. She'd lived through it before. But right then, in an increment of time smaller than that hair-second, her eyes flicked back up, and she saw the fist flying at her, and she experienced something only comparable to having a prothean beacon upload a thousand foreign memories straight to her head. In one instant, she unlocked a lifetime of understanding. She didn't want Garrus to hit her. She wanted him to touch her; but she didn't want him to touch her like this.

Worst of all was the knowledge that she had to that point _enjoyed_ it — not the pain itself, because Shepard wasn't a masochist, but she was so starved for contact and specifically contact with Garrus that she would accept even a violent iteration of his attention. Not anymore. Now she couldn't stand the thought of him hitting her, couldn't stand the thought that she deserved it, couldn't stand the thought that what she wanted was gentleness, couldn't stand that she'd used him, couldn't stand herself. She saw the fist coming at her, and she froze, and Garrus hit her in the jaw.

Shepard went down hard on her side. 

Her vision twinned. On the left was Garrus hitting her not for practice but because he knew the truth, because he'd uncovered what she had paid so dearly to keep from him. On the left was Garrus hitting her with deadly intent. On the left was Shepard, who had fought until she was bloody and sick with it but who even then had gone on fighting, giving up. The lefthand Shepard accepted what had come due. The lefthand Shepard laid her burdens down at his feet, and then laid herself down, too.

On the right he was soft with her. On the right he reached out and cupped her jaw, slid a hand under her hair, traced the hairline on the nape of her neck. On the right he slid an arm around her waist. On the right he breathed against her throat and set his cheek against her own as he ran his hand down her bare spine. The righthand Shepard surrendered not with acceptance but with a frozen ire so intense she couldn't move. The righthand Shepard wanted to know what the hell he was doing.

"Jane? Jane!"

Neither of them, not the right hand nor the left, would give name to what they desired. It wasn't absolution, although absolution colored it; it wasn't grace, although it lived where grace yielded to tenderness.

The starry field in her vision drained drained away, leaving Shepard facing the floor. She was on her hands and knees, breathing hard. Blood throbbed in her temples.

"Shepard, if you don't say something — "

"I'm fine," Shepard said. She sat up and wiped the back of her wrist over her mouth. Garrus was crouching beside her, his face tight with tension; he reached out for her slowly, taking her shoulder with one hand and then seizing her chin with the other.

"Damn it. I'm sorry, I didn't think I hit you that hard," he said, tilting her face to inspect her jaw. Shepard shuddered under his hands and his regard. That rush of understanding had collapsed inward and burrowed into a dense knot in the pit of her stomach. She felt nauseated.

"You didn't," she said. "I'm fine. Just knocked me for a loop." Against the instinct that urged her to press harder into his touch, she pulled away and climbed to her feet. It took her half a second too long to find her balance, but then she steadied herself into a ready stance and brought up her fists.

"You… Shepard, you've got to be kidding," Garrus said. 

"What, think this means you win?" said Shepard. "Good try, big guy, but I've got a few more rounds left in me."

"Was it a flashback?"

"Garrus," Shepard said, "come on," meaning, _Come on, Garrus, don't dig into this; come on, Garrus, I'm always fine; come on, Garrus, I've lived through worse._

"No," he said. "We're done for the day." And then — when had he gotten so pushy? — he started to herd her towards the hatch. "You're going to sit down while I look at your head, and then you're going to relax for the rest of the day."

"It wasn't a flashback."

"Ask me if I care," Garrus said.

And Shepard, who had stared into the dying red eye of a Reaper she had killed with her own human hands, backed down. It went against instinct, but lately she'd spent a lot of time fighting her instincts and winning. Didn't Shepard always win her battles? 

So she let Garrus guide her back to the couch, let him check her eyes and her reflexes for a concussion, accepted a mild anti-nausea medication and a cup of thin coffee, and stayed off her feet for the rest of the day. She yielded, although she wanted to freeze him out and retreat to her cabin, because she was exhausted. She yielded because she needed his care and hated herself for needing his care. She yielded because he deserved to be indulged after having spent so many years deprived of indulgence. She yielded because she couldn't afford to drive Garrus away.

Shepard was not accustomed to shame. She understood self-loathing but largely considered it an affectation cowards used to avoid taking responsibility for their actions. In the past, when she had experienced regret, she used it as fuel to set right her wrongs. Now, though, after London and the Crucible, she was lost in a labyrinth of guilt. Around every corner was a reminder of her failure, and the knowledge that she had earned the full measure of her disgrace drove her deeper and deeper into that black maze of defeat.

There was no question she had earned it. Garrus had never asked, so Shepard had never told him the story of what happened on the Citadel in that final hour; but if he had asked, she would have told him that she had dragged herself past Anderson's body to the heart of the Citadel. She would have told him that the Catalyst was nothing more than an unshackled AI. She would have told him that the Catalyst had presented her with a choice — that with the capabilities of the Crucible, she could have forced a union between organics and synthetics, or she could have controlled the Reapers at the expense of self, or she could have destroyed them by paying the toll of xenocide. 

She would have told Garrus that victory over the Reapers meant very little when Shepard didn't understand how it had come to pass. How could she understand? She had been bloody and sick, on the very verge of blacking out. When the Catalyst had given her three choices, she had fought for consciousness only long enough to refuse all three. Her refusal should have cost the galaxy its last, best hope; but instead she had woken weeks later in an Alliance hospital, where they hailed her as a war hero because they were unaware that the rot of her failure was eating her from the inside out. 

And that —

That was the fourth day.


	13. Chapter 13

What ate up most of their dead flight time was not paperwork but reading. Aboard the Normandy, Shepard had been consumed with the dozens of operational tasks required of a ship's skipper, and that meant filing reports, reading reports, writing reports based on other reports, and filling out enough forms to level all but the hardiest executive officers. Even Garrus, who had first been a contractor for the Alliance, then a mercenary hired by Cerberus, and finally a Hierarchy specialist assigned to Shepard's command, had been forced to face off with the red tape he despised.

Now that they were a crew of two with the Council as their only official superiors, the paperwork had lessened but by no means disappeared. It was, however, for maybe the first time in Shepard's adult life, possible to stay ahead of it. She had leisure time now — not just time to exercise or tinker with her guns, but whole hours and sometimes whole days to pursue her own interests. Occasionally she filled that time with novels or vids, but mostly she, like Garrus, busied herself with reading more relevant to her position.

Shepard was going through the latest catalog from Rosenkov. One of the perks of working for ST&R was the access to top-of-the-line equipment, much of it early prototypes; her Rosenkov catalog in no way resembled the Rosenkov catalog available to less prestigious customers. Garrus was pouring over a ballistics article complex enough to make even Shepard's vision blur while one of his procedural telenovels played in the background. She'd had plenty of technical education, both in the course of her electronic warfare training and because nobody knew how to do what Shepard could do with a rifle without a decent understanding of mathematics, but Garrus had a knack for physics and programming that would've served him well in an academic career. He'd probably gotten that from his mother — she'd left the Department of Intelligence at age thirty with a doctorate in linguistics and a gift for software composition.

"You know what bothers me most?" Garrus said. He didn't really like police procedurals; he just liked to pick them apart. "Any officer who discharged his weapon three times in the span of a week would be assigned to deskwork, not to a date with his supervisor."

"Speaking from experience?"

"Shepard, please. I've never asked my supervisor out."

Over the lifetime of their partnership, there had been two separate occasions when Shepard had wondered if Garrus was hitting on her. The second had been on Menae, immediately after they had been reunited after a forcible six-month separation, when he had briefly taken her hand between both of his. The first had been during a conversation on the SR-2 prior to the assault on the Collectors' base. In retrospect, he'd clearly just had a gift for putting his foot in his mouth.

"Come on, Garrus," Shepard said. "You can't tell me you haven't thought about it. Settling down, having a couple of kids."

He cleared his throat. "Sure."

Shepard turned another page of her catalog. "You don't want any?"

"I've… definitely thought about it. Who hasn't? But if you're asking if I'm going to run off to start a family, then the answer is no."

Rosenkov had retooled their Volkov line to vent heat more efficiently. Interesting. "Haven't met the right woman?"

"Oh, I wouldn't say that," said Garrus. 

"A war hero like you? Half of Palaven must be falling at your feet." Heat sinks were still more efficient in most ways, but there was a hell of a lot to be said for a rifle that didn't require reloading, and higher-caliber firearms rarely had a rapid rate of fire anyway. Shepard cared about accuracy, and she cared about precision; she didn't need to spray her targets when one well-placed shot would do the job more efficiently.

"Because I care so much about what Palaven thinks," Garrus drawled. "Anyway, what about you?" 

"Palaven won't be falling at my feet any time soon," Shepard said.

"Very funny. No, I mean, uh… kids." Garrus had a way of accelerating his sentences, dragging out each word at the beginning until he tripped over some critical peak and tumbled down the other side. Shepard's discomfort with their line of conversation was so well-buried that she was free to sit back and let him talk himself into a noose. "If that isn't too personal," he added. "Although I've seen parts of your body that should definitely stay on the inside, so we... might be past that point."

She swiped to another page. "Parts of my body?"

Garrus, who had somehow fooled most of the galaxy into thinking he was smooth, squirmed. "This is another thing fiction always gets wrong," he said. "Suspects don't just spontaneously confess to a crime. But here… here it happens every other episode."

"Does it," Shepard said.

"I meant in surgery. Your, uh, body. They let me observe a couple of times when they were attaching the socket and ports for your leg. Remember how they had to replace the original? It took you a while to adapt."

"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak," Shepard quoted. At his curious expression, she added, "Something my dad used to say. From a human religious text. He was brought up Catholic — Christian."

"What was he like?"

"Big. Red-headed. Warm. Had both his legs, though."

"So not a krogan, then. Guess that means I lost the pool."

"Ha. No, not a krogan," Shepard said. "He said he never understood what my mom saw in him. She was career — staff lieutenant and climbing — but then she met him and decided to resign her commission."

"Was she special forces?"

"Naval command," Shepard said. "Went to the Academy. Not like me." _Not like me_ was currently the highest praise Shepard could fathom. She had thought about having children before, but not in any serious sense; always from that red nebula of genesis in her past until she had woken up in a London hospital minus one limb there had been room only for her career. On human ships, there were strict laws against fraternization, and whatever leeway she might have taken, whatever disregard might have been permitted by her status as a Spectre and her unique circumstances, Shepard had chosen not to take that opportunity. 

It was her newfound instinct for masochism that led her to ask, "Turians not to your taste?"

"...What?"

"If Palaven doesn't do anything for you, there's women of all shapes and colors out there. Men, too. War hero will get you through the door, and that voice of yours will do the rest." 

"My… _voice?"_ Garrus said, sounding as stunned as she'd ever heard him.

Shepard, artificially unconcerned, flipped to another page. "Come on, someone must have told you."

"Told… me," Garrus said. "Told me… what?"

She may have talked herself into a corner of her own. "Forget it."

"What about my voice?"

On the other hand, it was criminal that nobody had bothered to tell him. Even Traynor had brought it up once, although that had been in the context of a lengthy and inebriated dissertation on EDI. The problem was one of transparency. Shepard strove for transparency in her professional life, could even respect it on a personal level in the context of equivalence, but some hidden part of her shied away from it when it demanded real vulnerability. 'Transparency' may have been the wrong word; what Shepard feared was illumination.

And Garrus's voice...

She didn't like expressing that revealing a preference even to him. Who knew how the hell he would take it? It wasn't Shepard's place to tell him that people quivered when he spoke, that his rich timbre and easy drawl were more erotic than than the most explicit pornography; it wasn't her place to tell him that his voice fell not only on her ears but caught in her throat and dragged up her thighs; it wasn't her place to tell him that the casual, careful tone he used only with her made for the most inadvertently intimate encounters of her life.

Someday he'd figure it out, and he look up his recon scout, and he'd leave behind the hunter's life he shared with Shepard in favor of a couple of kids, a less grueling job, and someone who was not partner but _wife_. He wouldn't abandon Shepard; he was too faithful for that, and whatever else she thought of him, Shepard knew that his gratitude to her was genuine.

But hell, the things she could tell him… She could tell him his voice was a fixture in the late-night stories she told herself, that she listened for him when she was in the shower and her hand was between her legs. She could tell him that it wasn't only the deep harmonic sound of him that lit her up; she could tell him that his faithfulness, his trust, and his adoration were as much a staple of her fantasies as the filth she imagined in his mouth.

She could tell him, but she didn't. Shepard prided herself on her competence and control, and this line of attack was threatening both.

"Nothing," Shepard said. "You'll figure it out someday. Here, take a look at this hyper rail. Adapts to any mid-size assault rifle."

Garrus hooked an arm over the back of the couch and leaned sideways to look at Shepard's tablet. "I didn't realize they were trying that again. Mhmm… you know, every couple of years they try to push the idea of 'overclocking' the mass accelerator, like muzzle velocity is the only important factor. And increasing the length of the barrel will only get you so far."

"Cavitation is the goal."

"That's less effective than using specialized ammo," Garrus argued. "Say... frangible rounds."

"You know that doesn't work," Shepard countered. "For one thing, a standard ammunition block won't function with the shearing mechanism required to manufacture that kind of large, specialized projectile. And it wouldn't penetrate anything other than an unarmed, unarmored target."

"There's the VI problem, too." He sat back and scratched his cheek. "Same as the hyper rail. Most smallarm software suites don't hold up to extensive modifications."

"Glad you're seein' it my way, Garrus," Shepard said, although she had no real idea of what either of them were arguing about. Garrus was sufficiently distracted, and that was what mattered. Let him ponder external ballistics while Shepard used the feint to cover her retreat.

"Although," he was saying, "that does remind me..." He stood and made his way to the upper deck access.

"Going to tinker?"

"Later," he said. "I just remembered something in the local files we were sent about the Quisling. From what's-her-name. That asari detective."

"Let me know what you find," said Shepard. When he was gone, she let her head fall back onto the cushion and shut her eyes. This, all of it, was laughably, even impressively pathetic. What she was going to _do_ she didn't know, and as foreign as indecisiveness was to her, right now the simple act of existing had stolen all of her effort. Fortunately, there were enough rifle modifications to sufficiently distract Garrus until Shepard either figured out how to light a candle or perished from self-immolation.

On the screen, the last credits of Garrus's crime show ended and the next vid in his library started automatically. Shepard jerked upright when she heard the deep starscream of a Reaper and then relaxed, at least superficially, when she realized the vid was a war documentary.

 _"But perhaps most insidious among the Reaper's weapons was the threat of indoctrination."_ The voiceover played over time-lapse footage of a rotting tree. _"While most survivors of indoctrination were left with severe neurological damage, experts say that those who were exposed to subtle, prolonged brainwashing but escaped mentally intact when the Reapers were destroyed may number in the hundreds of thousands… or even in the millions."_

The camera cut to a salarian. _"It's unusual, yes. Still, there are more than you think. Many indoctrinates occupied key positions — military, civil sector. Corporate, occasionally. Targets that were useful. We speculate that the Reapers utilized 'slow indoctrination' when they didn't want to jeopardize brain function."_

Shepard disliked war documentaries. They were either aggrandizing or scolding; even the few that approached even-handedness had an agenda. What did fascinate her was footage of the Crucible firing. She had a private collection of clips, culled not only from top-secret sources but also from wide-release recordings, and had watched the Crucible's energy beam shoot towards the Charon relay from every existing angle. It was one of the definitive images of the war and showed up even in vids like this one that were only peripherally related to the Second Battle of Earth.

And there it was. The camera was positioned between the Citadel and the planet, and the long nose of a turian dreadnought was visible in the foreground; this was a ship shot, more stable than the footage taken by drones but also a lower resolution.

 _"Little is known of the after-effects of slow indoctrination,"_ the voiceover continued. _"Victims rarely come forward. Is this because they don't recognize the symptoms, or because they're ashamed to admit them?"_

Shepard's reaction to the Crucible was both personal and visceral, but she could put aside her experiences long enough to admit that the idea of it was beautiful. The destructive beam of light that carved its way through the relay lanes wasn't only a human triumph, a turian triumph, a krogan and salarian and quarian triumph; it was a triumph of the protheans, too, and of all the trillions of spirits who had fought and died and added to the design that had ultimately brought about the Reapers' end. It was a triumph of collaboration and legacy.

Their victory should have brought pride with it. Or relief, at least. They may have held the line, but evidently Shepard could no longer be satisfied with winning.

_"...Which is the most important information to spread. The effects may manifest as headaches, insomnia, dramatic changes in drive or personality…"_

When she'd been a kid, her bedtime stories had been make-believe heroics. Hannah Shepard had taken the roles of both villain and victim, and if their play did more to wind her daughter up than calm her down for sleep, she had never minded. And then that daughter had grown up to discover that real life was messier; sometimes it didn't matter if you won in the right way when winning was merely an act of survival. 

Shepard had been sixteen when she had learned that it wasn't always possible to save the day, but she'd never correctly internalized the lesson — or maybe it was only that she'd grown more determined to struggle against the harsh impartiality of the universe in the aftermath of that education. It hit her harder every time she rediscovered that she couldn't control everything or save everyone. She wasn't always the hero. In fact, the quality that others saw in her and named heroism Shepard had only ever viewed as a commitment to doing what was necessary.

_"We've barely begun to understand how the aftermath of indoctrination interacts with comorbid conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or Legionnaire's Syndrome. This is a silent epidemic that, when unnoticed and untreated, can lead to disastrous ends."_

Somewhere in the dark, a spark flared to life. 

And that was the fifth day.


	14. Chapter 14

Keeping Garrus close was a survival instinct, but that didn't mean he never frustrated her. He frustrated her almost as much as she frustrated herself.

A lifetime ago, when she'd been young and dumb and green, she'd been operating as a counter-sniper working alongside a small exfiltration team on a desert world. The planet hadn't even had a name other than its numerical designation, but the exfil group had taken to calling it 'The Rock,' and the nickname had stuck. They were supposed to be extracting a human arms dealer who'd made his fortune selling to colonists, mercenaries, and the Hegemony alike; he'd agreed to pass along intelligence to the Alliance for an exorbitant fee, but before the Fleet could pick him up, he'd been kidnapped by the batarians.

Shepard's primary directive had been to advise the extraction group and if necessary engage with enemy marksmen, but her secondary directive had been to assassinate the arms dealer if extraction proved impossible. Of course, it all went to shit shortly after they hit dirt; the batarians had known they were coming. She'd ended up pinned down and surrounded at the far end of a canyon. They'd held her there for fifty-nine hours, in the hot hard-baked desert, until strategic use of flash grenades and her own dehydration worked against her. Then they fell upon her.

She hadn't been a prisoner long — reinforcements arrived within six hours — but for those six hours, and for the preceding twenty after her water supply ran out, Shepard had finally understood thirst. 

_"Damn_ it," Garrus muttered.

"Solana riding your ass again?"

"No," he said. "Well… yeah, but not right now. Got another interview request."

"Delete it," Shepard said, her attention already pulled back to her own terminal. They were at their workstations in ops; Garrus was sitting across from her, hunched over his tablet and scowling. "Unless you want the money." After a second of thought, she added, dubious, "Or the exposure."

"They don't want me," he said. "They want you. It was a source I trusted, too."

"Really," Shepard said, without inflection.

"Almost trusted," he amended.

"Surprised your VI didn't catch it."

"They scrambled it," Garrus said. "Guess the damn thing isn't as smart as it thinks it is."

"Delete it," Shepard said. She didn't get why it was bothering him; but then, she'd had the media baying behind her for her entire adult life. "Delete it, forget about it." She was reading a breakdown from Liara on the current political climate on Palaven. The faction opposing mandatory service was gaining ground at a surprising rate, and Liara had done some digging on who was funding which side of the argument.

"Sure," Garrus drawled. "I'll delete this one, and the one after that, and the one after that, but when does it stop?"

"If you're angling to shoot a reporter," Shepard said, "I will remind you that it would be better to wait until we come across one that already has a warrant."

"No promises, Shepard."

Unsurprisingly, just about every other political entity out there had a vested interest in the outcome of the forum. The open debates would continue — first with invited speakers registering their opinions, and then with those who hadn't been invited but who wanted to publicly argue the topic — until a threshold number of Hierarchy citizens voted to close the subject and bring it to legislation. By all projections, Palaven was months from reaching that threshold number and years from abolishing mandatory service, if it ever actually came to that. Unsurprisingly, the abolishment movement was largely driven by Palaven's colonies, but the idea had picked up a surprising amount of support on the turian homeworld, too; any proposal that made it to the stage of the forum had to attract a hell of a lot of attention first.

Garrus snorted.

On the other hand, galactic politics were no longer a necessary part of Shepard's life. The outcome of the war had once swung on her knowledge of interspecies relations, but now she didn't even have to read the headlines if she didn't feel like it, however hard that habit was to break. When she finished Liara's letter, she didn't immediately fire back a list of questions. Instead, she pulled up C-Sec's file on the Quisling, scratched the stubble on the side of her head, and dragged her hand through her hair. It was snarled — had she forgotten to comb it again?

Garrus sat back in his seat and crossed his arms.

In the desert canyon, during that shitshow of an extraction, Shepard had been pinned down by the batarians for fifty-nine hours. She'd been carrying enough water to last her thirty-three with careful rationing. The first twelve hours, when it was still dark, had been fine; she had enough stim pills to keep her alert, and her position behind the balcony of an old cliffside observation deck had been, if not desirable, at least adequate enough to provide cover and a choke-point. 

Hour thirteen had brought the sun. Hour twenty had stolen her shade. By hour twenty-five, her lips were so cracked they no longer parted without considerable effort and pain. Her throat was so dry that the simple act of breathing, of air moving against the lining of her larynx and trachea, scraped her raw. But down below, she counted five batarians, and in her canteen there were only five-hundred — no, four-hundred — milliliters of water. 

That was the worst part: for all she knew, that four-hundred milliliters of water would have to last her for the rest of her life. It would have to last her forever. Her head was hammering and her pee was more orange than yellow and right there beside her were four-hundred milliliters of water and she couldn't drink a drop. Not yet. Every hour she let herself have a mouthful, and when the hour rolled over she unclenched her hands from her rifle and picked up the canteen. She unscrewed the lid. She worked some moisture into her mouth — it was harder every hour — and peeled her lips apart. She put the canteen against her lips and tipped it up and the water touched her mouth, it was warm and wet against her lips, it was warm and wet with a little grit and she set the mouth of the canteen against her own mouth and tipped it up and water ran warm and wet past her teeth and over her tongue and she drank

one

mouthful

and then she screwed the lid back on the canteen and set the canteen aside and picked up her rifle again and tried not to think about what it meant that her pee was more orange than yellow. 

That was the worst part.

Garrus cleared his throat and sighed.

"All right, Vakarian, spit it out," said Shepard.

He didn't even bother pretending that he hadn't wanted her to ask. "They sent a list of questions," he said.

"Your reporter friend?"

The irritated twitch of his mandible told her just what he thought of her word choice. "'Friend.' Sure. They want to know how you feel about the current non-aggression pact between the Council and the Hegemony, why you didn't force the Alliance to pay attention to the Reaper threat earlier, and who you're scre — uh, seeing."

"I told you to delete it."

"Damn it, Shepard, you can't tell me it doesn't bother you — "

"What doesn't bother me?" Shepard said. "The invasive questions? The entitlement? The criticism of my personal life?"

"That's… a pretty good start."

All right. Okay. She closed the C-Sec file and turned in her seat to face him. The two workstations in the Valkyrie's ops center were massive, three-sided rectangles that shared one side, and the space between Shepard and Garrus was usually littered with jointly-owned tablets, schematics, gun parts, and mugs. More than once she'd taken a sip of her coffee, only to discover it was turian kava. That was Garrus all over: he had slowly, inexorably, and inexplicably invaded every part of her life. She wasn't sure she liked it. In fact, she was increasingly sure she didn't.

"It doesn't bother me," she said. "That kind of public scrutiny can be useful. Even helpful. You know what people in positions of power get away with — "

"Come on, Shepard, that makes it sound like you think you deserve it."

She let that pass without comment. "Not like we can do anything about it, Garrus."

"No, but — what word did you use? 'Entitlement.' They act like you're answerable to them. Convenient, when the official story was that you were lying about the Reapers for attention right up until the invasion started."

That was true enough, at least as far as most reporters went; there were exceptions, but Shepard hadn't been treated close to objectively by the press — not when she was a lone voice calling for resources to prepare for the Reaper threat, and not when she was suddenly the last resort of a desperate galaxy. Worst: in the wake of the war, public fascination with her had skyrocketed, and she now had to deal with the objectionable state of being a _celebrity_.

"Hell, why do you think I resigned my commission?" she said. "Now that I'm only on the Council's payroll, I don't have to play nice with the media — what?"

Garrus dragged a thumb across his brow and then met her eyes; he'd picked up on all kinds of human mannerisms, either from Shepard or from his years on the Citadel, although that flat stare gave the gesture a twist all his own. "You didn't resign," he said. "The Alliance forced you out, and the Council… they've never treated you like they should."

"The Alliance didn't force me out," Shepard said. "They recommended I resign. It was expedient for everyone involved."

"Because you weren't willing to shut up and follow their rules," Garrus argued.

"At least the Council lets me run my own show — "

"Only because you make them look good," Garrus shot back. Here was her firebrand; there were times when she was almost convinced that he'd left that youthful passion behind for good, that he'd traded all that hot-headed arrogance for a cool, easy competence. She wasn't sure what it said about her that she liked drawing that heat out of him, riling him up, seeing if he'd get worked up over _her_. He frustrated her, too — it was hard to make him angry without first matching his anger with her own — but Shepard was better than he was at self-abnegation.

"Okay, hotshot, what's the alternative?" she said. "Working for the Council at least makes use of my training and experience, and there aren't a hell of a lot of opportunities for an ex-special forces operative. ST&R isn't a bad hand."

"You've _been_ useful, Shepard. It's a miracle you survived at all. There's nothing that says you have to spend the rest of your life doing…" He shook his head. "Any of this."

"Shipping me off to the retirement farm already?"

"No, I — damn it, that's not what I meant. They don't deserve you. Not after they refused to listen to you, blackened your reputation, got you… well. You know. And then, once they finally decided to believe you, they made it so you and only you were responsible for winning."

"That's offensive," Shepard snapped. "Millions of people gave their lives — "

"That's not what I mean."

"Then drop it," she advised. She didn't want to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about it, because some coward, craven, self-gratifying part of her liked the immediacy with which Garrus defended her. No, she didn't just _like_ it — she _coveted_ it. She yearned for it, yearned for his assuredness that she deserved to be respected, that she owed nothing to the people she had failed, that her choices were made with reverence and care, and that her actions had served the greatest good. 

It was so seductive, that line of thinking: she could see herself abandoning her more rational assessment in favor of his utter conviction that she was a _good person_. Garrus Vakarian thought Jane Shepard deserved to be defended against those who doubted her. Garrus Vakarian felt Jane Shepard was worth the indulgence of passion. Garrus Vakarian had never questioned Jane Shepard in his life.

That was reductive and untrue — Garrus was plenty willing to call her on her bullshit on a micro scale — but the spirit was honest. It was his black-and-white thinking all over. On a macro scale, Garrus Vakarian was willing to throw away the promises of career, family, power, respect, meaning, and satisfaction in favor of following Jane Shepard on a series of mercenary jobs and trying to protect her from petty accusations. The entire situation was a clusterfuck; Shepard couldn't even remember the last time someone had tried to protect her. At some point he was going to pull his head out of his ass and leave, or she was going to pull her head out of her ass and make him.

What made her most disgusted with herself was that she'd given in to the impulse anyway. She could've led the conversation towards a series of practical solutions — better VI screening, a press agent that would refuse all requests, a controlled interview with a trusted source that would at least slow the tide of interest — but instead Shepard had allowed him — Shepard had allowed —

"You don't have to do this, Shepard," he said.

She wasn't sure if she was deliberately misinterpreting him or not when she said, "What else am I supposed to do? Working for the Council may not be my first choice, but it beats the hell out of farming."

In the desert, during a shitshow of an operation, Shepard had been pinned down by the batarians for fifty-nine hours. She'd been carrying enough water to last her thirty-three, and she'd rationed that water down to the last, had meted it out not by the milliliter but by the nanoliter. The sun had beat down and the dust baked on hot hardpan rock and Shepard had measured out her water drop by drop because what she valued and what she'd made her strength was the control that was not borrowed but was instead worn on her bones like a steel splint. She was control. She was made of it. Her control was the dam that held the flood of her thirst at bay; but even the beaten metal of her will couldn't banish thirst entirely. The thirst was still there. It was always there. Shepard was gifted at self-abnegation, but not that gifted.

She was realizing that what she'd lost on the Crucible was not her clarity but her control. During the war, she would never have been weak enough to consider any of this. The press was sometimes an obstacle and sometimes a tool; what they said about Shepard didn't matter unless it interfered with her work. Garrus was a good partner, but pity and friendship sometimes made him run his mouth; what he thought about Shepard didn't matter unless it interfered with their efficacy. Shepard knew what made her useful and what gave her purpose; what she felt didn't matter unless it interfered with the mission.

And that, all of it, all of the bullshit, all of the navel-gazing, all of the nightmares only meant that it was time to remember herself — that it was time to remember that her will made her what she was. In the desert, she hadn't wanted water half as much as she now wanted Garrus to love her, but that only meant she needed twice as much control, and in the years since the desert, Shepard had hardened exponentially.

But like her thirst, the dreams were still there. When she went to sleep, she dreamed a dream where Garrus touched her and asked how long she'd been waiting. That was the sixth day.


	15. Chapter 15

There were nights when she held solitary vigil on the ship, and on those nights she understood scale like no other person in the universe.

Shepard was not a woman who let panic rule her. Her prolonged exposure to stress was enough to cure her of the reflexive reactions most people had to danger, and training supplemented with physiological augmentation had curbed her instincts even further. In some ways, she was actually better suited to wartime than she was to peace.

That was one of her dearest secrets — that a distant, furious part of her had come alive at the threat of the Reapers, because fighting against them had been the first time Shepard had ever been pushed to her limits. Something shamefully primal had woken in her at sixteen and had never quite gone back to sleep; that part of Shepard, fueled by an immense resourcefulness that thrived on intense stimulation and an unquenched thirst that meant she pushed herself harder every year, had fallen in love not with the war but with fighting it.

But even that didn't scare her. On the rare occasions when her nerves woke beneath the layers of scar tissue that usually deadened her to sensation, the failing concerned her, but it never concerned her enough to excise it. The secret of that bloodthirst was all tied up with the infrared of her rage and the ultraviolet of her hope and the gamma radiation of her fear, and the summation of those parts was the force beneath her professionalism that drove her.

What did have the potential to haunt Shepard was the vastness outside the world of the ship. It threatened and comforted her by turns, sometimes overwhelming in its size, sometimes soothing in its abyssal indifference. There was no way to explain it to someone who had lived most of their life on a planet and whose only exposure to space was through popular vids. Two vessels flying in formation might be mere specks to each other on a visual display. Fleets spread across spheres that rivaled or surpassed the size of the Earth. And ships, even commercial and private ships, regularly flung themselves across distances that should take not years but generations to traverse… 

She shifted in a crash seat designed for different proportions and ran a hand over the console in front of her. Above, the shifting spectrum of conventional FTL cast a weird light across the bridge. They'd reached the halfway mark on their flight to Suru, and the engines had started decelerating the Valkryie. Shepard sometimes imagined she could feel the shift, the mark when the ship stopped accelerating and started decelerating, but that was a fantasy — artificial gravity compensated for the change so easily that no flesh-and-blood being could detect it. There were ghost stories, though, about ships that accelerated infinitely to the end of the universe, or ships whose engines shut off in deep space and refused to stir again, or ships whose mass effect drives malfunctioned and left the crew exposed to relativistic effects like time dilation.

Humanity wasn't all that far out from their first contact with the stars; it hadn't happened in her lifetime, but it had in her mother's. Shepard had always thought that the turians had to be a relief after all the stories her race had once told each other about what lived beyond their world. The First Contact War had been a terrible misunderstanding, but the turians were members of a galactic community that spoke and moved and existed in ways that were sometimes foreign but were never beyond human comprehension. There had been no biological or political chasm too deep to bridge, no unreconcilable divide in motivation or ethics, no concepts at all that were mutually unintelligible; after a brief (a very brief) adjustment period, humans had found themselves part of a galaxy that was in many ways merely Earth drawn on a larger scale. 

Some philosophers and scientists had questioned that — how, in all the vastness of the galaxy, did almost every sentient species end up with bipedal locomotion? With similar life-support needs? With common values like "love" and "duty" and "honor"? Was it solely the influence of the protheans? Or was it coincidence? 

And then the answer to that question had come out of black space and reawakened humanity to their fear of the dark. It had changed them in ways they hadn't yet begun to discover. Shepard was still waiting to see what new world would be constructed out of the parts of the old. On some nights the uncertainty of what was coming bore down on her, and on others it didn't seem like it mattered much at all.

What did the universe even look like to a Reaper? Were they even truly conscious, or were they just profoundly sophisticated tools that carried out their programmed objectives with ruthless efficiency? If she had accepted the Catalyst's offer to integrate with the Reapers, what would she have become?

What had they felt as they hung in dark space, suspended for fifty-thousand years? 

When they slept for all those long millennia, did they dream?

And then, the Rome to which all roads led: _Were there any left?_

It was what Shepard would've done — hold a small force in reserve — because no matter how assured you were of your victory, you always, _always_ made contingency plans. On the other hand, the Reapers hadn't needed to be tactically sophisticated when they had such overwhelming advantages in technology and numbers. Teams of scientists were working around the clock to tear apart what remained of the Reapers and learn everything they could, and the galaxy had, perversely, never been more ready for a large-scale assault; the Treaty of Farixen had been repealed the day after the Council re-established itself on New Eden Prime. To what end, though? If the Reapers had held back some of their numbers — if the signal that spread from the Crucible through the mass relay lanes hadn't reached dark space —

No amount of dreadnaughts would save them if the Reapers attacked again in the next century. The magic bullet was gone, the Citadel was rubble, and any war fought against them would be little more than a delaying action, if that reserve did exist. In the end, no one would ever really _know_. And that didn't frighten Shepard; it didn't make her feel anything except a numb, horrified exhaustion at the thought of having to do it all over again. She wasn't sure she could do it. No: she was sure she couldn't.

She lacked even the energy to think up contingency plans. Every time she hit a mental wall, and against that wall her drive, her survival instincts, her protectiveness, her experience, her training, and her strategizing meant nothing. She would try to think about it and would instead find herself fantasizing about running away. It was possible — pick the right uninhabited planet, and two people with a well-supplied starship could comfortably live out the rest of their days without attracting any attention whatsoever.

The possibility made her leg ache, and she realized she'd drawn it up so she could knead the muscles in her thigh. Everything above her tibia was intact, but she sometimes had psychosomatic flashes that convinced her she'd lost everything from the hip down. Her fingers crawled to her ankle, which really was artificial; she had her heel propped on the peak of the crash seat's contouring, and since it was designed for someone far taller than she was, she'd gradually slid backwards until most of her body was curled in the bucket of the seat. For Shepard, who was always aware of the effect of her posture, the position felt almost unforgivably vulnerable.

Garrus was the one who'd named the ship, and for that reason she'd let him have the left-hand seat that she always subconsciously associated with the pilot. Back when he was a kid he'd taken two trimesters of comparative religion, and something must have stuck, because she'd caught him reading about everything from the batarian's Pillars of Strength to the asari's Athame Doctrine. He liked Earth's mythology, too; when he'd named the Valkyrie, he'd claimed it was fitting that the ship's namesakes were warrior-women who descended into battle from the skies with blood on their armor and light gleaming from their spears.

She'd never appreciated xenotheology as a field, but sometimes she wondered at the stories that had grown up around the Reapers. From legend to fact, all in the span of a lifetime; what else was waiting in the empty spaces between stars?

Alone, suspended in the dark, separated from vacuum only by the thin bubble of her ship's hull, Shepard watched the universe. 

It was probable that the universe watched her back. 

And that was the seventh day.


	16. Chapter 16

Shepard imagined herself holding a portion of that stillness in her chest like a glass ball. All that distance, all that emptiness, all that scale; the silent enormity of it gave her a measure of peace, or at least of remove. She imagined it expanding outward until it encompassed her. She could float, suspended, in the depths of that muffled, airless bubble, and observe the outside world, secure in the knowledge of absolute separation between what was without and what was within.

It was, if not crazy, than definitely a shit-poor coping mechanism. Dissociation, probably, but what they didn't tell you until you'd seen combat was that dissociation was a necessary and even expected part of a combatant's mindset. 

"Coffee?"

Shepard started. Garrus was standing at her side, holding a mug in front of her. She took it from him reflexively, wrapping both of her cold hands around the cup, and only then noticed that someone had draped a shock blanket over her. 

"Thanks," she muttered.

"No problem, Shepard," he said, and then he folded his legs and settled onto the deck beside her. Shit — she was still in his seat on the bridge. He wouldn't fit in hers.

"You fell asleep," he said. "I thought about waking you up, but I know you — uh, figured you could use the rest." He had a cup of kava. An actual cup, or rather a mug like her own, which amused her distantly; a lot of races preferred to use cylinders with sealed drinking ports on both ends. 'Straws,' humans called them. They were yet another relic of the asari, from the days when artificial gravity was an unreliable luxury. 

He didn't mention that Shepard was his seat.

"Yeah," Shepard said, although she hadn't been exactly sleeping. Nor had she been awake; the stars streaking by outside had lulled her into a kind of liminal state, half-waking and half-dreaming, that left her feeling groggy and restless. Her intent was to throw the blanket to the side, drain the coffee, stand up, and get to work, but her body refused the instruction.

Garrus let out a slow sigh, stretched out his legs, and leaned up against the side of her chair. His upper arm was resting on the slow alongside her thigh. The intimacy was a shock. It wasn't something she would've allowed from anyone else, but they'd been working and living alongside one another in such close quarters for so many months that the gesture was — for him at least — unconscious. In fact, it had been for her, too, until recently; how many times had she leaned against him on the couch, or balanced herself with a hand on his shoulder, or casually invaded his space as she reached past him?

Shepard was struck by a thought: that there were some people who don't get better. There were some people who didn't heal. They just got sicker and sicker, more and more consumed; they didn't age; they merely existed, suspended, until they finally collapsed inward under the weight of their own rot. They fell inward forever without ever reaching the relief of termination.

"Solana wants me to come visit," Garrus was saying. He'd been talking for a while. "You, too, Shepard. She has a month of leave before she starts her new assignment on the Resolute. Dad's meeting her at New Eden Prime. Apparently they're going on vacation." He shook his head. "Never thought I'd see that."

Another injury that had never quite healed was that she didn't remember much of her early years. Sixteen to twenty was more a void than a blur, and that black sink crept outward until fourteen and fifteen and twenty-one started to vanish, too. It wasn't exactly that she didn't remember, but she remembered imprecisely, distantly, in broad strokes rather than details. She had no immediate recall of most of that time; she could tell you where she'd been and what she'd done in the same way she could recite a general timeline of the First Contact War, but she was almost totally unable to place herself in those memories. There was rarely any sensory component.

She didn't waste a hell of a lot of time dwelling on it, because it had little to no impact on her daily operation, but when she did, it bothered her. Who simply _forgot_ entire periods of their life? It wasn't recent, either. She would've liked to blame Cerberus's poor reconstruction, but the truth was that Shepard had simply blocked out, or maybe failed to pay attention to, a significant part of her life.

Dissociation. Again.

Another truth was that she was no longer human. Her journey to a liminal existence that was neither fully synthetic nor naturally organic had started with enlistment; Alliance marines were regularly altered with implants, with genetic treatments, and with psychological conditioning. Her stamina and reflexes were boosted beyond baseline levels to meet the standards of the Fleet. Severe training added another layer of alienation. The Cerberus procedures had been even more invasive — invasive to an unethical, untested, unapproved degree that involved as much luck as planning. No doubt the techniques Miranda had employed were sophisticated and even groundbreaking, but what they had done in forcing electrical impulses into dead tissue involved more engineering than healing. 

Shepard didn't know where to draw that line between necessary medical intervention and transhumanism. She knew she was not born with her current bones, which more resembled the ribs of a ship than the ribs of a person, and she knew her neurological system was far removed from what it had been three decades ago. How much of the gaps in her mind and her personality were bridged by software had always concerned her. There may not have been a control chip in there, but what else did they change?

A third problem: without the war to ground her, she found herself slipping back into that fugue state. Or maybe she was merely at capacity — maybe whatever hardware that stitched her neurological system into the illusion of a whole was starting to fail. Planned obsolescence. 

"They're putting her in charge of her own squadron. I'd call it overdue, but I can't pretend I'm all that excited about the brass promoting her right before they send her to some top-secret location. Did I mention that? She won't tell me where she's being posted. I can think of a couple of high-profile assignments that will… uh, let's say guarantee her plenty of engagements. A couple of the colonies, a few of the Council's new frontier worlds." He huffed a sound that was not a laugh. "Omega."

When other people tried to relate to Shepard — this was off the battlefield — they approached her in one of four modes. There were her superiors, who guided her aim; her subordinates, who supported her military actions; her skeptics, who reminded her that her feet were clay; and her supplicants, who saw her as a savior. A very few stood on level ground. They were the ones who, tempered by respect or caution, understood that Shepard was fallible, which made them the hardest to deal with. The rest viewed her as an expensive, sophisticated piece of highly specialized hardware.

Shepard struggled on a daily basis to reject that mindset. _People_ were important — _individuals_ were important — and therefore by extension _Shepard_ was important, not as a Fleet cog that had burned through millions of taxpayer dollars in training but simply as herself. Objectively, that conclusion aligned with her ethical metrics. Subjectively, it became a harder sell. There was a logical leap required that she could never quite make, because it required a division between the soldier and the woman, and for twenty years and counting Shepard had measured her value, her goals, and her existence with the scales of the Systems Alliance Navy.

But how all those parts fit together…

"She still doesn't know I'm Archangel," Garrus added. He shifted to set his empty mug next to the three others on the console above him. "Which is… probably for the best. Dad suspects, but he's never said anything outright. Not that he ever will. Huh. You know, Shepard, he almost reminds me of you. Of course, Mom always said he and I fight because we're too damn similar. That's one of the things they never tell you about getting older. Never thought I'd agree with her."

She felt like she was trying to force together seven different pieces from eight different puzzles with the expectation that, taken as a whole, they would resolve into a single image.

For the first time it occurred to Shepard that in most of the ways that counted, she had never come back from the Crucible. Was that good? Was it _right?_ Was it better to die as yourself than compromise and survive?

"I think she might be seeing an old friend of mine, actually. Sol, not Mom. Obviously, because Mom is…"

Maybe she'd been stuck in that twilight world for years. Every day after Alchera was borrowed. She thought of it that way — the great divide being not the appearance of Sovereign, nor the advent of the Reapers, but the silent suffocation of space while her ship burned beyond her. Her last, desperate reflex had been to try to reach the SR-1 before her rotation had sent her spinning to face Alchera for her final view. A+300 had been the Alpha Relay. A+486 was the Reaper invasion. A+2305 was here and now. That was twenty-three hundred days of an afterlife — more than most people were guaranteed.

"Uh, anyway. Vel Phaeton. We were in the 43rd together, and then he joined up with my Reaper task force. He's Blackwatch now. Did you know I didn't had the clearance to confirm that until I made Spectre? He's a bastard. Good man, hell of a good shot, but a bastard. Sol won't tell me anything, but he dropped a couple of hints the last time he wrote… I'll have to figure out how to get it out of him. Doubt she's said anything to Dad, either."

Shepard blinked. 

"On the other hand," he drawled, "she could do a hell of a lot worse. Don't tell them I said so, though. Someone has to carry on the Vakarian line, and Vel might as well marry into the family — the Phaetons could use a little respectability. And I wouldn't mind being the crazy uncle who shows up a couple of times a year to wind the kids up before they go home to their parents. Someone has to teach them how to shoot straight. That's where we come in."

Her hands were warm, but her coffee was freezing, like she had long ago leached all the heat out of it and soaked it into her own body. 

"Running a junior rifle camp?" she said. "That's a hell of a demotion."

He heaved in a great big sigh and let it out so slowly it whistled faintly past his teeth. "Shepard."

"Can't say I ever realized the Vakarians were known for their respectability, either," she added, and then she drained her mug in three swallows. It tasted awful, but black coffee wasn't always easy to come by, and good coffee less so. Garrus brewed it in a press, because that was how he made his kava, and he was too lazy to do more than half-heartedly rinse it out before he made her coffee; the grounds ended up all mingled together, lending both drinks a bizarre mélange of sweetness and salt. 

"Come on, Shepard, you should know by now that I'm the model of decorum," Garrus said. He leaned forward when she started to swing her legs to the side, giving her room to squeeze her way past him and stand up. Her joints were stiff, and her legs — leg — shaky. She didn't give herself time to stretch, though, because it seemed more important to take three quick paces away from where Garrus still sat on the deck.

"Come on yourself, Vakarian," she said. "Time to start digging into the files. I want a full workup on the Quisling. Not what we've got — something we compile ourselves."

"Sure," Garrus said, and he hauled himself to his feet.

"Give me ten minutes to shower," Shepard said. "I'll meet you in ops. Thanks for the coffee."

"Always, Shepard," said Garrus. She was already beating a retreat to the head. She smelled stale, even gamey. Almost like she'd been standing guard on the bridge against some impossible, unknowable attack. Paranoia was another thing they didn't tell you about when you enlisted, and like dissociation, it made for strange days and stranger nights. But Shepard could use it. She knew it, and she named it, and now like her fear and her shame, it held the tide of her thirst at bay.

And that, from morning to evening, was the eighth day.


	17. Chapter 17

Shepard had never taken Garrus for granted — she never took her people for granted — but she had treated him in a manner that in some ways resembled casual disregard. Fear was what drove her. If he had limits, if there was some quality in her nature that could cause him to turn against her, she didn't want to know it. Her strategy was the avoid that specter of a thought entirely. Maybe she was too tired for contingency plans; or maybe Garrus was just a blind spot.

She was reading over an Alliance intelligence brief in the mess when he tracked her down. Her reconstituted eggs were cooling on her plate, but at least the intel was useful; she'd pulled a couple of strings with FLEETCOM and managed to persuade one of their extranet teams to trace the Quisling by his purchase history. It was long, grueling, tedious work that had started when Shepard, combing over the dossiers provided by various governing bodies, investigation agencies, and corporations, had built a profile of their target based on his tastes. The Naval Intelligence Division had fleshed that profile out, fed it into their computers, and combed through the results by hand — a necessity not only because of the breadth of the project (hundreds of millions of people in the galaxy liked StarShine Premium Water, severe military-cut trousers and pants, and Asari parlor-synth music) but also because of the differences in regional laws concerning privacy. Still, the joint effort had produced a list of eight fake identities that the balance of probability suggested were aliases of the Quisling.

"Shepard," Garrus said.

Shepard grunted and kept reading.

"Shepard," Garrus said. "We need to talk."

"Busy, Garrus."

"You can finish later. This won't take long."

That caught her attention, and she realized he'd taken a seat across from her. He was leaning forward, hunched over so the back of his crest almost brushed his carapace: nervous. About… ?

"Okay," Shepard said, and she set her tablet to the side. "Shoot."

Give him this — when he finally set himself to a task, he didn't shrink from it. That was because he didn't let his fear govern him, not like Shepard, who in her personal life was inclined to bury her head so deep in sand that she no longer remembered the sight of daylight. The best that could be said about her internal mechanisms was that she was at least self-aware. 

"I'm… " He exhaled. "Worried about you."

"We've been over this. I'll see a professional when we're done here."

"That's not soon enough."

Shepard, who had been praised as 'highly adaptive to rapidly changing circumstances' in at least three of her last ten performance assessments, changed tactics. "Come on, Garrus, you're making it sound like I'm the walking wounded. It's just stress. Insomnia."

"No, it's not. The irregular sleep schedule is one thing — I'm not an expert on humans — but this goes far beyond that. "

She put up a finger, asking him for a moment to collect herself, and he gave it to her. "Okay," she said. "Okay, I hear that you feel strongly about this. I can't deny I'm working through some baggage — "

"You sat on the bridge for eight hours without moving," he said. "Eight hours _that I know about_. That isn't healthy."

Shepard slid her seat back a couple of inches and leaned forward, mimicking Garrus's posture. "You're right," she said, "but we don't have time to address the problem right now. Tell you what — as soon as we land on Suru, I'll make an appointment at a clinic, and in the meantime I'll take some pharmaceutical sleep aids."

"You've been taking those. They aren't working," he said, and then added: "I've been counting the pills in the first aid kit."

And just like that something shifted, or shattered, or surrendered, and the rot inside her broke free of the chamber that contained it. It devoured thirst and betrayal and anger and loathing and rationality, it devoured the mired panic and fear and prophetic assurance of a coming reckoning. It was not clean; it did not burn red or yellow or blue; it did not produce light. The rot was green. It spread through her like spores and seared her throat not with fire but with acid and set whatever was left in in her on a path that led to decay.

"Like _hell_ — "

"This, whatever it is, it's eating you up! And Shepard, it's _getting worse_." He sounded like he couldn't decide whether he should beg or shout. "You're jumpy. Drinking heavily. Skipping meals. You have mood swings — you zone out — "

"I fail to see how that's your business."

"And I'm far from the only one who's concerned," he continued. "Williams and Liara are worried, too. So is Tali. Even Joker, believe it or not."

"Talking behind my back?" Shepard sneered. "Which is it — am I unhinged, or just too weak to handle myself?" 

"Stop," Garrus said.

What occurred to her next pierced her too deeply for her not to turn it against him: "You drew the short stick and got stuck babysitting me, is that right?"

"You know that isn't — "

"No? You think you owe me some deep, profound debt for rescuing you from mediocrity, maybe, or maybe you feel sorry for me. Tell me, Garrus — are you here out of obligation or pity? Poor Shepard, not what she was, too damaged to function — "

"I never said that." His voice had gone hard.

"Then what is this supposed to be?" Shepard pushed. That was what she did: when her back was against the wall, she came back twice as hard, no matter that this attack was coming from an unexpected quarter, from the one person she'd always expected would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her against the onslaught. "An intervention? An ultimatum?"

"What the hell do you want it to be?" he snapped back. "I'm at the end of my patience."

This was it — where she lost him. But whoever acted first acted with advantage; if this was a battlefield, then Garrus would be the one who ceded control.

"I keep thinking that you're finally acknowledging the problem," he said. "Reaching out for help. When you talk to me, or when you apologized and agreed to see a doctor — "

Shepard laughed. "Did you really believe that was genuine?"

_"...What?"_

"It was easier to play along," she said. Bewilderment had abruptly blunted the edge of his anger, but there was a kind of dawning sickness there that hinted at a realization of just how thoroughly she had played him. "You were so ready to jump in and help, so eager to hear me say I was sorry for how I'd treated you… so much for those cop instincts."

"You lied to me."

"Not for the first time," Shepard said. "This, whatever it is — don't get me wrong, Garrus, it's nice having a partner, but it's all easier if you think you owe me. Wasn't like it would last much longer. I have my demons, but I'm not the only one. When was the last time you visited your family? Can't have another one of them dying before you get around to saying good-bye."

There was a thrill in the pit of her gut that she hadn't fully felt in years: the lurch of adrenaline that set soldiers to dry-heaving before a fight. Garrus's problem was that despite everything he'd seen and done and had done to him, he was still an idealist. It was what made him dangerous, but it was also what made him vulnerable. 

Her throat burned.

"It's past time for you to stop tagging behind me, anyway." Relentless, she drove onward, although the expression of betrayal he was now wearing drew an echo from the hollow chamber that had once housed her rot. "Not that I'm not flattered by the loyalty, but you've always needed me more than I've needed you. They all know it — "

"Why?"

"...Excuse me?" Shepard said, brought up short.

"Why?"

"Why _what?"_ she spat.

"Why bother?" Garrus said. "Why take me as your partner at all?" (That fucking word again — ) "Why refuse help you admit you need?"

Shepard stood up. "This conversation is over."

"No, it isn't," he said. "You almost had me fooled — you know where to hit, and you know how to set up a distraction, but damn if that isn't all this is. So tell me…" She tried to back away, but his hand shot out and wrapped around her arm. _"...Why are you punishing yourself?"_

Shepard froze like she never had, even as a raw recruit. His fingers were long enough to close all the way around her wrist, and the gaslight blue of his eyes was enough to match the terrible red gaze of any Reaper.

"Back off, Vakarian," she warned, and she jerked her arm free.

He didn't flinch. "You aren't going to win this one."

Shepard, who was sick to death of trying, sick of death of being, just sick to death, turned on her heel. She had tried; she always tried. It was never enough.

"Go ahead and run, Shepard!" he called after her. "You'll only die tired!"

And that was the ninth day. It was the day that broke them.


End file.
